


Music is a made-up thing like myth

by sshysmm



Series: The Band AU [1]
Category: Lymond Chronicles - Dorothy Dunnett
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Age Difference, Alcohol, Alternate Universe - 1980s, Alternate Universe - Rock Band, Battle of the Bands, Cigarettes, Drugs, Drunk Sex, Multi, Musicians, Non-Linear Narrative, Parental illness, Period-Typical Racism, Prequel, Self-Harm, Sex Drugs and Rock and Roll, Teenagers, Terminal Illnesses, ew Tories gross
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-08
Updated: 2019-10-12
Packaged: 2020-08-13 03:24:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 25,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20167357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sshysmm/pseuds/sshysmm
Summary: Francis Crawford was one of the biggest names in twentieth century music. His grandson, who shares his name, wants to be known for his own style and not defined by his famous relative. After winning a battle of the bands competition at Solway Moss, he is snapped up by Lennox Records, and soon finds success isn't everything it's cracked up to be.It's 1979, the Tories just won an election, and the power may be back on but punk is dead and life looks grim. What else is there for a precociously talented teenager to do but embrace all the sex, drugs and rock'n'roll he can get a handle on?-About the archive warnings:  You'll know if you've read LC about the age gap between Francis and Margaret. In the UK the age of consent is 16, but I'm aware it may not be elsewhere; on the other hand, you can't legally buy alcohol until you're 18. Basically, expect teenagers doing stupid things, the same sort of nasty relationships you find in canon, and a lot of obnoxious references to music of the '70s/'80s.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A few little tweaks from canon: Margaret Douglas is late 30s, not early 30s, Richard is closer in age to Francis than canon (more like 5 years older rather than 10) and Eloise is also a little older than in canon, bringing her closer to Francis' age too.

**SOLWAY MOSS BATTLE OF THE BANDS!!!**

**ALL NOVEMBER – ALL VENUES!**

**Turn the winter blues into 12 bar blues: Hear the best young rockers of the Borders battle it out at local venues throughout the month! Win eternal bragging rights and be here to witness the birth of the Next Big Thing!**

**COME TO THE GRAND FINALE**

**CARLISLE CASTLE 24 NOV.**

**Industry reps will be present, bands will be thirsty for glory, ICONS will be made.**

* * *

The fluorescent yellow paper was turning translucent beneath persistent November rain. Along the streets of Carlisle, poster corners were peeling weakly from grubby brickwork, splintered wood, and dusty stone. The design was crude: marker pen and photocopied type script. Someone had added an apostrophe where they hadn’t meant to and later scribbled it out, but the smudge had still made it into all the copies.

Evening seeped from surroundings that had not seen the sun for days: oily puddles turned into dark pools along roadsides, damp-stained walls drew shadows up around their faces. The hyperbolic claims of the posters disintegrated in piecemeal patterns on every surface.

There was expectation in this weather though. People and buildings waited: they waited for the rain to stop, they waited for winter to come to its pristine, cold peak, and they looked ahead to the season’s passing and end. They were on the cusp of something, and to many it seemed that they discerned and understood what they had waited for on a small stage in a modern hall behind the castle. Many had seen the finalists perform several times that month of course, in pubs and clubs, unplugged in shops and on street corners, but it had all been leading up to this, the night of the coronation.

People came that night who had not been to any other events during the month, too. Word had spread: there was indeed an icon amongst them, an heir apparent, One to Watch, The Next Big Thing. They figured that they came to see a Crawford, son of the MP, grandson of the beloved Scottish superstar. He had just returned from an internship in America, and it was widely suspected that he was about to launch his political career and follow in the footsteps of his father, so this would be the only chance the public would have to see whether the musical talent of his more popular ancestor had materialised in Richard.

Richard was a solid-shouldered, built-for-rugby echo of his father (Gavin Crawford, CON, Ayr). He wore cashmere sweaters and chinos that advertised him as a St Andrews boy, and he was dark-haired and older in expression than his twenty-some years merited; not, in other words, the image of a man destined to change the face of rock and roll. Still, he could play, and with some natural flair at that. He could have held a stage quite well alone, with technical, precise guitar-playing and a pleasant gravelly voice.

He did not need to hold the stage alone, however, because his younger brother had also returned from foreign seats of learning to accompany him to battle. The younger Crawford, little mentioned by his father, loved less by him, left to grow wild and curious under his mother’s influence, was virtually unknown to his audience before the siblings’ first set together. A willow-thin blonde boy in his late teens, fresh from international schooling in Paris, wide-eyed and charming in his naïve intelligence, Francis Crawford junior brought the breathlessly optimistic advertising for the Solway Moss Battle of the Bands into surprising reality. He was quiet and watchful until he knew people, shyly restless on stage, easy in the borrowed flair of charity shop florals and fraying hand-me-downs, still learning to be ruthless with an audience that could not but be captivated. His playing startled listeners into the memories of tunes they had loved for years, riffs wandering through the back catalogue of Western music as though this fairy child had somehow lived through every aural revolution of the century. Between the rag-doll androgyny of his look and the pick-and-mix eclecticism of his influences, he was something still half-formed, still choosing who he was and what he wanted to be. A prodigy at his first major juncture, discovering himself in full view of the mesmerised crowds, as precarious as May blossom before a storm.

Who else could win?

His competitors did not begrudge him the victory: they loved him. A group of them had endured the local youth hostel together for the month, learning from each other, testing each other, and, most importantly, working out a system that allowed them to get served in the maximum number of off-licenses with only two fake ID cards between them. The ringleader of this enterprise was a boy of Francis’ age, black-haired, black-eyed, brown-skinned, and reckless with a knowledge of substance abuse that only the children of medical professionals could obtain.

Jerott Blyth was born out of the disintegration of Empire, raised in France by a Maghrébin mother and a young medical doctor. He had become Scottish in the household’s not-quite-amicable split, moving to Glasgow with his father, whose own parents — a British soldier and a Punjabi school girl — had met at the Military Hospital in Lahore. In any case, Jerott would have told anyone who asked that his culture was rock and roll, his heritage was punk, and he ‘came from’ the streets of Suffragette City. His father, now a senior medical advisor to the health service, had paid for years of professional music tutoring: Jerott had been taught and examined to Grade 10 classical guitar, and liked to say that you couldn’t really understand punk unless you knew everything that you had to leave out before you reduced a song to three chords.

Jerott’s band was in line for second place, but he played as though he had forgotten it was a competition. All he had come to crave over the month in Carlisle was the attention of Francis Crawford: to make a quip and see Crawford’s suppressed smirk; to play a riff and hear Crawford pick it up on his instrument. They had scaled the castle walls together and drunk spirits on the parapets; they had sung ABBA at karaoke nights in overcrowded pubs; they had terrorised the park ducks and serenaded landladies, and all their adventures had come to feel like a valedictory gasp at freedom and at life for Jerott. His world had recently been turned upside down and now there was a plan he needed to follow; people he must not disappoint. Responsibility awaiting him.

It was all ending then, that night of November 24, in the modern hall behind Carlisle Castle. The band members waited for the next phase of life to begin, the audience waited to see what they might become. They played with frenetic urgency, they sang with their hearts on their tongues, they were carried high on the encouragement of the crowd, willing them success, life, the world itself.

Of the judges, only one had really understood the significance of their job. The official prize for the victor was a voucher for a chain of music stores and a place on the stage at a summer festival, but success attracted success, and the winners would doubtless get more than had been advertised. She smiled perfectly outlined lips and tapped her fountain pen on the desk the judges had been given. Her dark eyes were full of a youthful spark though years of smoking had deepened the crow’s feet around them. She wore her age as distinction rather than something shameful or tired, and she smiled because she knew what the real prize was. Margaret Douglas had waited a long time to be the record agent to discover a Someone, and here she finally saw her opportunity. She had struck her deals with the other judges, and though he did not yet know it, Francis Crawford had been bought and paid for. Lennox Records would make a star out of him — and a small fortune if it could. Margaret turned her professional grin on her rival record executives, and when none met her eye she felt the satisfaction of a seasoned gambler gathering their earnings.

Francis Crawford and his brother won. No one in the room doubted that it was deserved. A victory for Scotland at Solway Moss!

At the after party, Margaret Douglas loosed her exquisitely styled and highlighted hair from its clip, undid some buttons on her blouse, picked up her drink and sauntered over to the boy whose talent had just opened the future up wide.


	2. Chapter 2

In a comfortably furnished shed at the bottom of an undecided sort of garden three siblings drank beer together. The garden appeared to be under a battle for custody, split between fashions in a way that left it more achingly idyllic than if it simply followed one style or another. Its backbone followed the austere discipline of those who mowed arrow straight lines of alternating green in the lawn, for whom a single dandelion among the tidy cropped blades was a sight to induce woe and curses. At the edges, well, the edges disappeared. Tumbling banks of flowers leaned drunkenly against one another. Roses and wildflowers, bent with the weight of their petals, touched gasping lips to the regimented lawn, and their discards disturbed the geometry of green with splashes of pink and apricot and red. Bees and other insects hummed around these blowsy borders, their work uninterrupted by the occasional shrill burst of laughter from the shed.

“I’m serious, Francis! You have to figure these things out,” Richard’s voice was as sincere as ever, but there was a smile on his face. He wore his customary shirt, but the sleeves were rolled up above his elbows and the beer gave his cheeks a pinkish flush. He leaned forward and gestured to lend force to his words, though the motion annoyed him even as he did so: the beer had gone to his head a little, because he was still jet-lagged and had forgotten to eat well that morning.

As he waited for his little brother to respond, he was not the only one to watch Francis’s expression toy with the idea of giving an equally earnest answer. A girl, as blonde as Francis, sat with long legs folded awkwardly about her, her pleated school skirt fanned across the beanbag she sunk into. Her school blazer lay in an untidy heap on the floor and she sipped from the warm can of lager with a steady thirst. Freckles underwrote the expressive grey blue eyes that waited for Francis’s pronouncement, but in general Eloise preferred to listen to her brothers rather than interrupt.

“This is the first time we’ve all been together in six months Richard, can’t the Gantt charts and board presentations wait until after the battle of the bands? After all, how do you expect me to make plans when I don’t yet know whether I have won?” Francis spoke softly, his eyes and smile united in their efforts to needle their responsible foil. He sprawled in an armchair that was upholstered with a garish seventies pattern: one leg was flung up over a side of the chair, one arm dangled over the other side close to his own drink. A mandolin lay across his body and he gave the strings an idle pluck every now and again just to banish the silence between chatter.

“I realise that a couple of hundred quid in vouchers for Crown Instruments is a life changing prospect,” Richard replied witheringly, causing Francis’s brows to raise and forcing Eloise to hide a snigger in her drink. “But once you’ve bought Henry’s cheapest strat you’ll soon realise that you still have your whole life ahead of you, and you’ll have to find something to do with it.”

“Oh. Well what do you suggest?” Francis allowed just enough doubt to creep into his voice to make Richard sigh, though his attention had turned again to the mandolin. “And actually I don’t want another strat. I think I’ll put it towards a sitar.”

“Oh, Francis, a sitar!” Eloise’s gasp overrode Richard’s disbelieving snort.

“Well, university, for a start,” Richard drained his can. “You could do anything, you’ve got the grades. Music? Law? Politics?”

Francis made an anguished sound. “Yes, Gavin would _love_ that.”

“That’s not a reason not to do it.”

Francis gave Richard a pointed look, dipped chin and significantly steady gaze. “I think I shall pursue music. It gives me greatest joy, and I have enough skill to make an independent living from it. I’d like to be able to help Ellie through university herself, if Gavin doesn’t approve of her plans.”

Eloise blushed, though Francis had made this suggestion to her before. “I want to study classics, Richard, you know that. Gavin will never agree that it’s worth him paying my rent for three years to study dead languages.”

Richard, the first and favourite, who could not really understand his father’s strict disapproval of his other children, looked at Eloise’s desperate pout. “You don’t know that. He’ll come round. Mum thinks you should do whatever you like.”

“Yeah, and look where that got her,” Eloise muttered as she raised her drink to her mouth. Just as she took a swig, the shed door opened, framing Sibylla Crawford, who wore an expression that denied all knowledge of the conversation she had walked in on.

The studied blankness of her face vanished momentarily, however, when she noticed Eloise choke and cough on her mouthful of lager.

“Eloise!”

Richard threw a hand out to snatch the can, even as his little sister resisted the theft for a moment. “It’s mine, Mum. She just wanted to try a sip. I figured she’d hate it so it was better to just let her find out for herself.”

“Mm, it’s vile,” Eloise nodded vigorously, wiping her chin with the back of her hand and trying not to lick the beer off her lips.

Sibylla looked down at her daughter with matching cool blue eyes. A towering six foot, reed-slim and fine-boned, it wasn’t hard to guess that Sibylla Semple had once been a model. Touches of Bohemian flair to her dress — chunky artisan jewellery, unique batik scarves — hinted at the fact that she had lived among creative circles, spoke subtly of a short-lived attempt to break into French cinema. Sibylla folded her arms at Eloise’s dangerously confident expression of defiance. It was an all too familiar look, one that Sibylla had seen in the mirror throughout her life.

“I know it’s hard now that both your brothers have finished. But you still have exams, Eloise. I’m sure there’s homework you should be doing tonight.”

Eloise sighed and unfolded herself from the bean bag as Sibylla dipped a hand to retrieve her crumpled blazer. Eloise trailed out through the door held by Sibylla with a miserable look of appeal directed to Francis.

“Can you teach me those scales on the mandolin later, Francis?”

He smiled and nodded, but met Sibylla’s sympathetic eyes as Eloise left, before his mother sighed and looked around the walls of the shed. They were covered with framed newspaper clips, signed photographs and discs in silver, gold and platinum. The legacy of Francis Crawford senior, banished to the shed because his son Gavin took no pride in it. Originally designed as a writing room for Sibylla, it had become the refuge of the children, who kept stashes of beer there, and listened to the latest releases on cassette and vinyl while gathered around the hi-fi.

“Don’t you two have to start practicing for November, anyway?” Sibylla asked her sons.

Francis twanged a few notes on the mandolin and exchanged a look with Richard. “He’ll pick it up quickly enough.”

“Francis hasn’t written anything I can’t follow,” Richard countered.

“Then have you been doing your gap year applications?”

Richard looked sharply at Francis, who focused on the instrument in his lap. “No, I thought I’d just get Richard to give me a job on his campaign team. I’ll ride off his parliamentary expenses when he gets elected and maybe end up in the right place at the right time to buy a peerage.”


	3. Chapter 3

Jerott Blyth presided over the communal kitchen in the Youth Hostel with military discipline. He faced the pair of volunteers returning from the booze run with his hands on his hips. “Did you get the vodka?”

“No, they were all out,” the girl said, depositing two clanking bags on the table.

“WHAT?”

“Not really! God Jerott, you make it so easy...” she rolled her eyes at her companion, who grinned as he put two more bags on the draining rack by the sink.

“Hey Jerott?” he took out two beers and handed one to the girl.

“What?” Jerott stopped rummaging in the bags, itemising what had been bought. He flipped his black fringe off his face, turning a stormy glare on his tormentor.

“Did you hear they’re taking the word ‘gullible’ out of the dictionary?”

They cackled and exchanged a high-five, but it was like water off a duck’s back: Jerott sighed and tutted, but the important thing had been achieved, and they had enough alcohol to see them through the Sunday closing hours. The others appreciated that, even if they couldn’t resist pressing Jerott’s buttons while he organised things. So now he set about unpacking, but noticed that a silent presence had arrived to help.

It was the first time he had seen the younger Crawford brother smile. Francis surveyed the drink, but the tiny smirk was certainly one of amusement at Jerott’s expense. Curiously though, instead of annoying Jerott like the others did, it made him want to smile too.

Francis had largely kept himself to himself those first days, and though he seemed quite content in the shared accommodation, he expressed little interest in steering the group or planning their escapades. He played his guitar quietly in corners and attended all drinking sessions politely, but seemed disinterested in the day to day topics revolving around teenage life. Whether this made him arrogant or boring was a matter for debate, but Jerott hadn’t really thought about it. Francis’s playing impressed him, and he was harmless and maybe a little shy. Nothing wrong with that to Jerott’s mind. He had plenty of ego himself not to feel challenged by another musician with talent.

“Beer?” Jerott opened a bottle with the tool he kept on his keyring, and Francis accepted it readily.

“I like the t-shirt,” he gestured at Ziggy Stardust’s face on Francis’s chest, and swigged from his own bottle.

Francis just nodded. Then, abruptly, he asked: “What’s your accent? Is it French?”

Jerott blinked. As variations on ‘but where are you from _really_?’ he had heard similar, but the implication was usually that there was a problem with how he sounded — not, as now, a note of hopefulness in the request.

“Mostly. I grew up there until my parents separated. I live in Glasgow now.”

Again, a silent nod as Francis absorbed this new information. «I studied in Paris. It’s still strange, I only just got back. I keep saying things in the wrong language.»

Jerott watched for any sign that the other boy was just finding a way to brag casually about his skills, but his French seemed impeccable, and his manner was genuine. He grinned and complemented Francis’s French, which relaxed both of them. The usual pleasantries were exchanged — where Francis had studied, where he had lived and what he had liked — but Jerott was pleased to dust off his mother tongue, and the conversation continued at the kitchen table while others staying in the Youth Hostel filed in and out for refills of their drinks.

For Francis’s part, he was intrigued not only by the opportunity to speak French again, but by Jerott’s bullish ability to rise about the mutterings of the other teens. Maybe it was something he’d had to get used to doing as an unusually brown face amongst pale Glaswegian kids, but he seemed confident in himself. This was a source of fascination to a boy who had spent his youth failing to live up to inscrutable paternal expectations.

There was also something irrepressibly charming about how Jerott always thought he had control of a situation, when he so rarely did. This was exemplified for Francis on the late night explorations they made of the city together: what seemed to be a watertight plan would descend into chaos as they drank, and one alteration could send the whole thing spiralling off into absurdity. Why were they sprinting across a park with pilfered traffic cones in their heads? Why, because that bouncer hadn’t believed they were eighteen and so they couldn’t get into the pub that held lock-ins. Why were they scrambling up the bank below the ancient walls of the castle in the dead of night? Because Francis had drunk the bar clean out of their one good Scotch and it had seemed better to return to the Youth Hostel for a blend they knew they both liked and take it back out again.

It was an unusually clear night for the time of year, cold and crisp. The dash up the bank was warming though, and Francis laughed in the face of a wall designed to withstand armed sieges that was tonight to be defeated by two drunk Scots boys. Jerott stumbled ahead of him, muddying the knees of his jeans and fumbling to protect the bottle of whisky.

The farce raised Francis to poetry, and he said in a loud whisper, broken by giggles:

“Et si quelquefois,

Sur les marches d’un palais,

Sur l’herbe verte d’un fossé,

Dans la solitude morne de votre chambre,

Vous vous réveillez,

L’ivresse déjà diminuée ou disparue,

Demandez au vent,

À la vague,

À l’étoile,

À l’oiseau,

À l’horloge,

À tout ce qui fuit,

À tout ce qui gémit,

À tout ce qui roule,

À tout ce qui chante,

À tout ce qui parle,

Demandez quelle heure il est;

Et le vent,

La vague,

L’étoile,

L’oiseau,

L’horloge,

Vous répondront:

‘Il est l’heure de s’enivrer!’”

He spread his arms wide at the foot of the wall, addressing the wind, the stars, the sleeping birds, and anything else listening.

“How do you remember this stuff?” Jerott shook his head, leaning against the castle wall and holding the whisky bottle out.

Francis smiled and knocked his head back, filtering the drink from a bottle warmed by Jerott’s hands. “It’s Baudelaire!”

As if that explained anything. Jerott grinned, his teeth white in the shadow of the wall, and he dredged up some long-forgotten saying of his mother’s:

«I drink wine from the cup

and from myself I approach myself

In myself it is myself I love.»

Francis gazed at him with round eyes, the colour of the midnight sky caught in their glittering depths. “Oh, don’t tease. Tell me what it means.”

Jerott translated the Arabic with a self-deprecating snort. “But don’t expect any more poetry from me. It’s not my forte.”

“You should study it then,” Francis licked whisky from his lips. “You’ll want to keep writing your own lyrics.”

Jerott shook his head and looked away. “No. I’m not staying in this business,” he glanced at Francis with an unusually candid expression. “I’m hoping to get married when this is over.”

Francis neglected to take the bottle that was being offered to him again. He stood with his hands limp at his sides for a moment, and then folded them. “What?” forgetting Jerott’s straightforward nature for a moment, he added: “Are you joking? Where are you going to find a girl desperate enough for that?”

“I’m not joking,” Jerott held the whisky out just as stubbornly as Francis refused to accept it. “My Dad’s been arranging it. We’ve been writing. If her family likes me when we meet then it’ll happen. Within a year I’ll be married.”

Francis couldn’t quite fathom the enthusiasm there seemed to be in Jerott’s tone. “Why?”

After a moment, Jerott brought the bottle to his face and, scowling, took a deep draught. He seemed to wrestle with something for a while, fidgeting on the grass and thumping the stone wall with the flat of his palm. “Look, I haven’t told anyone this. I didn’t want to...don’t want to think about it. But my Dad is dying, okay?” he studied Francis with concern in his black eyes. “He’s scared. I know he is.”

“I’m sorry...” Francis offered cautiously as Jerott drank from the bottle again. “But how does getting married help your father?”

“You know, it’s funny. Right now, most of all,” Jerott swallowed and blinked at his trainers, wishing he had not started to speak. “Most of all, I just want my Dad to be my Dad. While he still can be. But this...this marriage stuff, he’s never talked about it before. It’s like he got scared of his, his ancestors or whatever, once he got the diagnosis. He doesn’t really seem like him. But it _matters_ to him,” he said fiercely.

He looked for some note of understanding from Francis. “He wants to know I’ll be looked after. And she seems really nice,” he shrugged, the nonchalance of his stance belaying the plaintive tone in his voice.

Francis’s marble expression didn’t change, so Jerott shoved the bottle into his hands and turned to the tree growing up by this section of wall, changing the subject with action. They had scoped the castle out from a distance and seen the bare branches growing close to an area of wall that jutted out from the main parapets. If they got on it and made their way along a few metres they would be in the castle grounds in no time.

Jerott lifted a leg and pulled himself up by the branches he could reach, bracing against the wet bark and scrabbling until he was standing on one of the lower growths. It wasn’t too hard to get higher then, though the tree was a little spindly and he hugged his body close to the trunk for stability. A couple of metres up, covered in damp green dust, his fingers chilled from the wet bark, Jerott inched out along a branch and stuck a leg out over the crumbling top of the wall. With a shift of his weight, a little spring of faith, and a landing grunt, he managed to straddle the area of castle wall and then kicked his legs over until he was sitting facing Francis.

Francis looked up at him with moon-pale features, a frown piercing his brows. “How can you marry someone you’ve never met?”

Jerott rolled his eyes, regretting bringing any of it up. This was why he didn’t talk to white kids about his life. “I _will_ have met her before we get married. We’ve been writing for months. I know tonnes about her.”

Francis came close to the wall and pushed himself up on tiptoes to hand Jerott the bottle before he turned to the tree. He followed Jerott’s path up it, lithe and swift and confident. Just before leaving the tree he shook his head again though, as though another objection had only just occurred to him. “But isn’t it such a waste?”

Jerott kicked his heels, knocking crumbs of the wall off and supping whisky as he did so. “Waste of what?” he laughed when Francis scooched up the wall to sit by him. He tossed his fringe off his face and looked up at the moon with a reckless challenge in his eyes.

With a dextrous movement that tighter jeans would have prevented, Jerott got one foot and then the other on top of the wall. He gripped the bottle tight in one hand and grabbed for Francis’s shoulder with the other. Slowly, his knees shaking, he raised himself up to stand on the narrow wall. “Ha!” he shouted triumphantly at his imaginary foes, carefully releasing Francis’s aching collarbone and taking another swig of drink, affecting a lack of concentration that Francis knew was too reckless even for Jerott.

He might not like the idea of his future, but he wasn’t about to let Jerott get away with this particular stupidity without him. Francis shuffled to catch up with him, and took the hand Jerott offered, their arms straining with tension as Francis let Jerott take his weight and Jerott braced himself against nothing but the night air.

Laughing unsteadily, standing bow-legged and daring on the tiles, their hands did not separate even when Jerott passed the whisky across their chests to Francis’s cross-body acceptance.

“So you’ll have to remember me when you’re rich and famous and I’m married with eight kids in a terraced house in Leicester. The guy who made sure you could get drunk in Carlisle without fake ID.”

Francis gritted his teeth to throw his head back far enough to slosh the whisky into his mouth. “Oh no,” he smiled thinly. “I’ll be far too important to remember. You’ll have to sell your tale of woe to the tabloids.”

The journey along the top of the wall was punctuated by laughter and copious swearing. Achievement, when they made it to the main castle parapets, was commemorated in the form of Don’t Stop Me Now — a traditional celebratory tune, even then — and the whisky ran out. Morning, when it came invisible to the winter-black sky, saw both boys confident that their friendship would endure anything. Jerott believed that Francis had accepted his choice, and Francis still harboured a hope that he might persuade Jerott to keep playing music, married or otherwise. He had the rest of the month to work on that suggestion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Francis is quoting Baudelaire, as he says. The poem is 'Enivrez-vous' and it's about getting drunk. Jerott quotes some Rumi back to him.
> 
> Throughout I'll be using the ole' pointy brackets « and » to indicate someone speaking in a language other than English. I know Dorothy doesn't bother, but I'm interested in the switching, and it's probably more of a deal for Scottish kids in the 1980s to be speaking other languages than it was during the Renaissance...


	4. Chapter 4

A few weeks was enough for dynamics to shift as they learned more about each other — and themselves. The live performances brought out a thirst in Francis that even he had not predicted, where the audience’s love placed a terrifying, precarious trust in his hands. Jerott saw him unfurl in the warmth of this attention, his initial reserve swept away, revealed never to have been shyness at all, but rather a careful watchfulness, a way of figuring out the world before it could figure him out. Now Francis believed he had all existence unwrapped, laid bare for his eyes, and he was unstoppable in his mastery over the helpless people of Carlisle’s live music scene.

He wore it well, too. Jerott, who had been the instigator at the start of the month, watched Francis outstrip him on nights out, bringing in karaoke in public bars, teaching him new songs on the guitar, and constantly urging him on with poetry and quotation.

Now, when Francis Crawford leaned close to talk to him, something Jerott did not understand made the air seem warmer and the room feel smaller. Francis was explaining the intricacies of composition that lay behind the best-sellers of the decade. His hands fluttered enthusiastic gestures around them and his eyes saw something in a middle distance between them, but Jerott was transfixed, staring at the expressive, fine-boned face and the lapis blue eyes hidden behind curtains of golden lashes. They were in the middle of a crowded, dark bar at the battle of the bands after party, but Jerott was unconscious of anyone else in the room.

“Do you know what I mean?” Francis finished, snapping his gaze up to Jerott’s with an intensity that sent a jolt like electricity through the other boy’s skin.

“Yes,” was all he could reply, breathless as he tried to extinguish the heat in his chest with a drink from his cold bottle of beer.

Francis smiled, and the softness of his expression might have acknowledged that Jerott was feeling out of his depth, or it might have expressed a pure gladness that he had found a kindred spirit willing to listen to him talk about such things. It didn’t help the fuzzy feeling in Jerott’s mind either way.

“I can’t believe you’re really going to turn your back on all this.”

Just the words to break the spell: Jerott blinked and ran a hand through his long hair.

“There are people here tonight,” Francis pressed. “Who saw you play. Isn’t it worth pursuing a contract? You can be married and be in a band, you know.”

Jerott shifted uneasily. This wasn’t what he wanted to talk about on their last night hanging out. “It’s not exactly stable employment...” he said with a weak laugh.

“It could be,” Francis’s eyes were unusually intense, he gestured in the air again, gripping it as though it were Jerott’s arm and he might shake some sense into him. “I am going to be famous. I _am_ going to make it. Music is my life, Jerott, it could be yours too.”

It hurt, to have these words said with such hope, such conviction, when he knew he could not change his mind. “Francis, stop. I can’t.”

“I know, I know, you’re getting married, and tradition, and all that important stuff. But don’t lose what you have.”

“No, it’s not even that,” Jerott raised his own hands, shoulder-width, placatory, as though they were about to close and embrace Francis’s. “I’ve applied to sit extra A-levels. I can’t do this, I’m going to university, I need to do something with my life that matters.”

Francis pulled a scornful expression. “Music matters!”

“Come on, Francis,” Jerott mirrored his look. “I’m not saying it’s not important to people, but it doesn’t cure the sick.”

“It can cure emotional sickness,” Francis shrugged. “It can soothe the mind. I’ve heard about the effects old songs have when you play them to the elderly. Protest songs change the world, one life at a time. Song, time and again in history, has helped make life bearable for people in extraordinary, unbearable situations.”

What could he say to that? Jerott sighed and finished his beer. “That’s all well and good, but it won’t cure my Dad.”

“Neither will you,” Francis told him bluntly.

Jerott scoffed in astonishment, but Francis pushed on, determined to have his way, his victory, or to burn it all in the process. “You don’t have to do everything your father expects of you. It’s your own life, Jerott! I’ve stopped doing what Gavin wants, and I can finally breathe.”

“That’s the difference between us,” Jerott took a step back, vexed to find his eyes prickling in the smoky air of the bar. “I love my father. It’s not a chore to do this for him. And it’s for me as much as him.” His blood rushed in his ears and he tried to assuage the anger that Francis had no doubt intended to provoke. But he was just a posh white kid with a house in Morningside, what did he know about having a dying parent with the burden of a neglected culture on their mind?

“I’m going to get another beer,” Jerott muttered. In this bar, no one cared about their ID cards: for that night, they were the biggest rock stars in Carlisle, and celebratory drinking was expected of them. He backed away into the crowd, gestured at Francis’s bottle, and received a negative motion in response. Fine. If Francis wanted to be like that about it, what did Jerott care? After all, he had a life to go on with after this. He had a world beyond music.

At the bar, waiting for his drink to arrive, Jerott examined the photo of Alisha in his wallet. He’d have laughed at anyone who’d told him a year ago that he’d be giving up a career in music for a marriage arranged by his dying father and a place at uni studying medicine. But he saw that life ahead of him now and he was committed, he knew he could follow that path and be content. He wasn’t jealous of Francis, it was just that on this one night it was hard to remember that he wasn’t jealous.

A girl along the bar smiled at him: she had played in one of the other bands, but there was still an aura of success around the finalists that made others in the room turn their heads; flirt; giggle; make bold offers. Previously, Jerott might have revelled in this attention; even earlier that month he might have taken a bit of harmless flirting as his right, a last hurrah before the marriage, but tonight it just made him feel sick. He turned from the disappointed fan and decided he would go back to Francis, bring the conversation around to music, find their happy rapport again.

When he craned his neck to find Francis through the crowds, he saw only his back: blonde curls and oversized denim jacket. He was talking to a girl — no, Jerott corrected himself, a woman — and she was swaying coquettishly as she spoke to him, swilling a bottle of beer in her hand, her red-painted lips visible through the dark.

He recognised her as one of the judges — Margaret Douglas, king-maker, the woman who had inherited Lennox Records — and the angry serpent in his chest coiled upon itself once more. Fine. Just fine. Here was Francis, already making deals, signing contracts, beginning the path to a career in music, and he’d had the gall to judge Jerott for having his own plans and priorities.

Confused, angry, resentful of Francis and frustrated by his own uncertainty, Jerott decided he would just have to spend his last night in Carlisle becoming thoroughly acquainted with the bar’s offerings. _Rock and roll_, he thought to himself as he raised the beer to his lips.


	5. Chapter 5

He was talking, and though he looked down, away, eyes shyly wandering from her knees to the floor, there was energy in those blue irises. Margaret sipped her beer with delicacy and found that her smile came easily when Francis Crawford explained his musical influences to her. His chatter was sweetly entertaining, but she kept herself amused by trying to ascertain whether he was the kind of boy she could persuade into signing a contract by fucking him first, or the kind who would be scared off, who would only let her get near once he had signed.

She strongly suspected he was of the latter persuasion, and allowed herself a swift glance around the room. His brother, too old for youth hostels and teenage beer runs, had kept himself to himself throughout the competition. He was leaning on the bar now, talking with one of the sound technicians. The boy from the runners-up who had seemed to hang on Francis’s every word was also uninterested in rejoining his friend: he sulked in the shadows by the pool table, bottle in hand.

It left the victor alone, already a master of driving away those best placed to take care of his interests. Truly, Margaret had found her golden ticket: potential and skill combined, young enough to be pliant but intelligent enough to stick to agreements made. And he was beautiful, too. She longed to drag the oversized denim from his skinny shoulders, to reveal the versatile young body beneath; snake-hipped, pale, naturally strong where it needed to be. But she would have to tread carefully, because for all his talent and entitlement he had lingering doubts that made him suspicious. She saw the nub of these doubts with the perfect clarity of experience.

To give him credit, he was also aware of the source of his self-consciousness, and he eyed her carefully as he spoke his next words. “Apparently my voice is like my grandfather’s. I wouldn’t know though; I try never to listen to his work. I want my compositions to stand alone.”

It was a request, of sorts, and in the unnatural light of the bar, Margaret felt her chest tighten and her breath catch when he pinned her with a look haunted by fluorescence. His eyes seemed lit from behind momentarily, glittering like jewels among the wild shadows cast by his delicate features.

He wanted honesty; a reason to trust her. Margaret smiled, and let herself appear flustered under his gaze. “Well, the similarities are there. But your sound is more modern. More adventurous, I would say. Your grandfather knew how to write a hit record, but he often chose the safe option. Your work has the potential to be...daring. Challenging. Memorable in a new way.” Words he undeniably wanted to hear, words that she let him know excited her — dangerous words, that would require contractual conditions.

Her approach was working, Francis’s slow, gratified smile told her that, and there was a flash of lust in his eyes that she had not expected to draw out for some time yet. Perhaps she had misjudged him: there was an arrogant streak in there that left him blind to her motivations. It made a pleasant task yet more enjoyable, she decided.

It emerged that the boy had a taste for fine Scotch, and their conversation moved from the bar, to a booth, to Margaret’s room in a chintzy B&B — following her suggestion that he might like to listen to some demo tapes she’d been sent.

She inched her pencil skirt up to bend down to the bedside table, pulled the headphones from the jack in her portable cassette player and stroked the volume dial up to a level that had the potential to wake her neighbours. Francis watched her, still clad in that enormous shell of denim, bleary eyed and tousled, his hands in his pockets.

“There’s a bottle of wine in that satchel,” Margaret nodded at the unpacked bag and sank onto the side of the bed to edge off her court heels. “And a little something extra.”

He pulled out the bottle of red and then paused. Margaret held her breath, watching every moment of his expression as his long fingers brushed silk and lace smalls. He did not look up, and indeed barely blushed, but she saw the tips of his ears redden as he pushed her underwear aside to discover the small pouch of white powder.

“That’s the stuff,” she cooed, taking the bag of coke from him and shimmying past to retrieve a floral tray from beneath kettle, mugs and tea-making equipment. Francis moved slowly to the space she had vacated, looking first at her, then down at the cassette player. The demo was a particularly scuzzy recording, but white noise could not hide the skill of the wild drumming and the strict bass line holding the song together.

Margaret prepared some lines on the back of the tray and gave him a cajoling smirk. “You’ve gone all quiet. What do you think of it?” she gestured to the tape deck.

Francis nodded, and listened to a few more bars in silence, his hands wrapping and unwrapping around the neck of the bottle, as though he could open it like a screw-top. He looked up at her suddenly, and she saw with relief that he had no fears or suspicions now: he was just a drunk teenager, lost in the sound as he tried to unravel every note and figure it out layer by layer. “It’s good. I like the bass,” he told her.

He held the bottle up. “I don’t have a corkscrew.”

Margaret, who had been searching for a bank note in her handbag, retrieved the corkscrew she always carried and tossed it lightly to him. Francis gripped the bottle between his thighs, their wiry muscle draped in the silk flower patterns of his trousers. Margaret had to turn aside as he drew the purple stained cork slowly out of its neck, forcing the foil around it to open like a budding flower.

She made a smart movement over the tray, disappearing a line of white powder with a practised ease, as behind her the cork popped free with a satisfied sound. Francis swigged from the bottle and Margaret wiped her nose; then they swapped places, and she watched his blonde curls hang around his face as he bent delicately over the coke. Like so many intelligent children, determined to seem worldly because they had observed the world closely, he resolved not to ask, but steeled himself for a new task and pretended to be familiar with it. The wine bottle was warm where he had held it fast, and on its mouth she could taste the peaty residue of the whisky he’d had earlier.

The coke made him talk again, rattling off an analysis of each track on the demo tape. Margaret listened patiently until the lines she’d cut were gone, the wine was nearly finished, and the cassette had played through. Then she turned to the boy sitting beside her on the edge of the bed and kissed him deep and slow — just as she had planned to do since she’d first seen him perform.

It was late, or early, and they fumbled messily with one another until either he or she passed out.

In the morning she woke feeling like hell: a laddered stocking on one foot, hair full of fixative matted against pillow and cheek, make-up gumming her eyes and her lips together. The air tasted chalky and acrid and she was sprawled across a bed that had no one else in it.

Her eyes fastened shut, Margaret cursed herself. She was getting too old for this kind of seduction, and now she’d have to track down her quarry again.

Then, when she finally felt able to sit up, she saw him: too much the gentleman to disappear after a one-night-not-quite-stand, but protected from the ill effects she suffered by virtue of his youth. Francis sat on the floor with a sheet around his waist, his back to her, headphones on as he listened to more of the demo tapes. A milky mug of half-drunk tea was beside him, and he seemed lost in the music.

Margaret moved carefully to the edge of the bed, raking fingers through the tangles of her hair as she marvelled at the translucent pale skin of his back. The whole structure of him seemed revealed to her: bone and muscle and veins, breath and blood and life. She thought about running her touch down the line of his spine, but shied away from the gesture, one which seemed too tender and familiar.

He noticed some shift in the light anyway, and turned, removing the headphones. “You look like Sophia Loren,” he smiled and met her gaze unflinchingly.

For that alone, she dressed and tidied herself and took him down to a flea market that sold bitter, strong coffee. There was a piano for sale, left encouragingly close to the area that had pretentions to be a cafeteria. Taken by an uncharacteristic moment of whimsy, Margaret sat down in front of it and stretched her fingers out over a few bars of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Her newest companion joined her, comfortably close on the single chair she had pulled up, and he played his interpretation at the high end of the slightly flat keyboard. He sang along without self-consciousness or mockery, sliding between falsetto and a mournful croon with an ease that made her jealous and thrilled all at once. Her golden ticket. A prince worthy of her skills as king-maker.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Who likes bad ships? Roll up, roll up, get your bad ships here! Margaret is...not subtle.


	6. Chapter 6

“I know you think I’m just a silly old man.”

Jerott tip-toed around the medical detritus surrounding his father’s armchair, holding a dangerously full mug of tea. “Don’t say that, Dad,” he grumbled as his father chuckled drily, fighting to make the sound without it dissolving into a cough.

He successfully conveyed the tea to the table by his father’s elbow before flopping down on the couch and stretching his legs out on it. The cricket was on and he had a near-full packet of digestive biscuits. All the tools he needed for the temporary banishment of life’s little fears; or even life’s big decisions.

It worked for a moment, as his dad sipped gingerly at his tea. But there were still two days of cricket to go; it wasn’t yet exciting enough to keep his dad silent on other matters.

“I just want to know you’ll be looked after, son. I want you to be rooted somewhere, to be invested in the future. To do that you need to understand where you’ve come from. It’s hard enough: I know, I’ve always hoped to go to Pakistan and see where my mam grew up, and it won’t happen now.”

“Dad...” Jerott scowled at his biscuits, trying, just for a moment, to shut the door on the constant threat of death hanging over their home.

“And you’ve not just got that part of you to figure out — there’s your mother, and her family, her life in France. That’s part of you, too, and you mustn’t lose it.”

He shook his head but didn’t turn to look at his father. “How can I?” he shrugged, trying unsuccessfully not to spill biscuit crumbs on himself. He wanted to say: _well you’re the one who torpedoed that relationship, why do I have to pick up the pieces? _

“It’s easier than you think,” the voice behind him went suddenly faint, and Jerott sat up quickly, but his father was just pausing, trying to swallow painfully and control his breathing.

Jerott waited to see if he could offer any help before subsiding onto the couch again. “It’s fine, we’ll just rearrange the meeting again. I know she’ll be fine with it.” He felt the skin on his neck and cheeks warm at the thought of meeting someone he might call _wife_, and he tried to make his voice sound light, nonchalant. “And her family will understand.”

The first meeting between families had been postponed yet again. Jerott’s father just wasn’t strong enough, and no one dared speak the possibility of doings things without him. At least, that was how it seemed to Jerott. He and Alisha wrote friendly, chatty letters to one another, and it never occurred to him that all correspondence passed under the watchful eyes of her parents before leaving or entering that household.

He sensed, vaguely, his father’s worry on this topic. Jawad Blyth didn’t know how to arrange these things, he was just groping around in the dark, trying to find out what was expected, hoping he wasn’t offending anyone as he went — but full of a surgeon’s arrogance, and the trust that others would see he was being reasonable. He had written to promising sounding addresses in his mother’s old diary, he had asked around at work, and some had written back, some had passed the message on, and, through the thin but sturdy immigrant grapevine, the Blyths had been put in touch with Alisha’s family.

They wanted a formal introduction and they regulated the contact between their daughter and Jerott. Jawad said he found them stuffy and stubborn: “why would you come all the way over here just to do things like the old country?” he complained with the same lack of irony that his son had inherited. But although Jawad was as much a Glaswegian army brat as he was second generation Pakistani, he was trying to be more like the latter these days. He was suddenly realising the consequences of having cut ties with tradition — he fretted about his son being left alone, and he woke in a cold sweat from dreams where he saw his mother’s loneliness with a sudden clarity.

Initially strange and startling, the idea of marriage had been growing on Jerott: there was an undeniable appeal in the thought of a future guaranteed for him, years of confused stumbling through life no longer his to suffer through. He had been an impatient teenager, with the looks and attitude that got him very nearly anywhere he wanted. Now out of school, approaching his eighteenth birthday, he was growing jaded with the endless, meaningless excesses of many of his present hobbies — at least, he could persuade himself of this when he was sober, at home, contemplating the dullness of another night with the same people in the same pubs and parks. And, finally, though he shied away from understanding it, he knew how much this plan now meant to his father, and how proud Jerott’s agreement to it made Jawad.

“Have you told her about the battle of the bands?”

Jerott could hear the delighted grin in his father’s voice. “Sort of. I told her I’m into music, that I play a bit. I don’t think she listens to much beyond Bollywood soundtracks...”

After a moment’s silence an earthy chuckle emerged from his father, and Jerott’s skin reddened in anticipation. “Oh. Oh ho ho ho, that’s why my bootleg copy of _Sargam_ has disappeared. I thought one of those riffs you’ve been practicing was familiar.”

Jerott sank lower into the couch and muttered around a mouthful of biscuit. “It’s not like it matters anyway. After the competition I’m quitting the band.”

“You say that now, but what if you win?”

“It doesn’t matter! I’m registered for the extra exams and I’ve made up my mind.”

Jerott wished he could take back the petulant whine as soon as he felt the silence stretch after his words. He scrunched his eyes shut and sighed.

“Son. You might be a musician and you might not be. If you choose medicine instead then I will be just as proud. But make sure it’s your choice.”

What Jerott Blyth really wished he could choose was for his father not to be ill. For things to be like they were last summer, for life to feel like an endlessly stretching road of possibles and for growing up to be something you did bit by bit, not all at once, whether you were ready or not. Not having that choice was enough to make him smoulder with a tumultuous anger, but where could he direct it? Maybe, in the future, he could focus that feeling into an attack on the disease that was going to claim his father. It was a distant hope of vengeance, but it was the only one he had.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hint: the arrogant person with no idea what they're doing is in actual fact ME. I wanted to smuggle a bit more diversity into the story (even though damn it does well for the 1960s/'70s). I know Jawad is unusually lenient for a British Asian father, I know the rates of separation at the time were incredibly low in society anyway...but Dorothy's characters are in the top 1% of Renaissance society, so I figure I have a bit of leeway to make these guys unusual by their respective standards, too. I'm happy to hear constructive comments though!


	7. Chapter 7

The girl who stepped off the train seemed too small and young to be alone in such crowds. She wore a hand-me-down denim jacket that swamped her tiny frame. Its hem ended only just above that of the tartan pleats of her mini skirt, and her bare legs where mottled with the scrapes and bruises of careless growth spurts, demonstrating a mind that struggled to keep up with the directions her body was taking. But her wide-eyed astonishment was quickly replaced by a cheery smile, a wave, bounding on the balls of her feet, when she saw her brother waiting at the end of the platform.

Francis acknowledged Eloise in a more subdued fashion. He wore a frayed and faded baseball cap and a smart black hoodie pulled up over his golden hair. He toyed with a pair of sunglasses folded in his hands and tried to trust in the anonymity of London streets.

It had been a strange year.

He listened to his sister chatter about school and homework during the short walk to the tube, and smiled at how she went quiet and small in the face of the bustling paths of travellers criss-crossing, plaiting together and splitting apart as they streamed away to various onward journeys. He kept a careful hand on her back or arm at all times, tugged her gently in the right direction, and finally managed to convey her to a carriage that would take them somewhere central; somewhere too preoccupied with its own business to care about the chart-topping musician winding his way between the crowds.

Eloise sat with her arms crossed around a scuffed rucksack and her knees clamped together, staring up at the adverts and maps that lined the train carriage. Her pose barely changed when he sat her in his favourite corner of his favourite Soho bar, and eventually Francis had to laugh and push the drink he’d bought her into her hands.

“Don’t stare, Ellie. Mia only likes that kind of attention from a certain type of chap.”

Eloise blushed and tore her eyes from the publican: a transvestite with a cascading orange wig and poisonous green glitter eyeshadow that set off smooth black skin.

“Cheers,” Eloise grinned at last and swallowed a big mouthful of Murphy’s. “So this is what keeps you in London, is it?”

Ah, the pleasantries had already been exhausted. “I’ve been rather busy,” Francis shrugged. He took off his cap and undid his hoodie, revealing a more characteristically garish pattern on what was in fact a tailored designer shirt. Gold and green baroque swirls danced across a black background that made it look like he wore opulent palace curtains, or an unwoven rainbow. From the breast pocket he drew tobacco, filters and papers and began to roll a cigarette.

Eloise watched him momentarily, then produced her own equipment. The siblings eyed each other, but Eloise cracked first.

“I thought you didn’t smoke. Because of your voice.”

Francis shrugged. “I’m trying a different aesthetic. What’s your excuse?”

“It’s fucking boring sitting in the shed on my own without you and Richard,” she replied coolly, sprinkling a filling onto her paper that, though it emerged from an old Harp packet, resembled nothing so much as an expensively pungent strain of weed.

Francis shifted his own paper across a part of the table not sticky with beer and Eloise obliged him by filling it with a sigh. “And I thought my rock star brother would be treating _me_ to all the drugs in London.”

“Patience, dear heart,” he muttered around his joint, leaning over to light hers before his own.

“You don’t see Richard often?”

Eloise let out a dramatic breath of diffused smoke and rolled her eyes. “He’s theoretically managing Gavin’s constituency surgery, but he always seems to be off doing research somewhere,” she pulled a face. “I think he’s in Nairobi this week.”

Francis grunted. “Is Gavin behaving himself?”

“Ugh he’s such a stuck-up old prick,” Eloise pouted. “You know I’m only here because he was away when I asked to visit, and Sibylla thinks I need to broaden my horizons.” She smirked and raised her eyebrows as she examined her joint. “He wants me to be some society girl like her, but do you really think _she’d _choose to do it all again?”

Eloise paused, paling a little as Mia came to tower over their table. “Y’all think I can’t smell the difference?” the publican demanded, reaching for Francis’s joint even as he offered it.

Francis smiled obligingly and explained to Eloise: “Mia is from the United States. But once Soho sucks you in...” he grinned a feral grin up at her and Mia raised her brows as she drew deeply on the cigarette.

“You see? Purely medicinal.”

“I know it,” Mia handed the joint back and gestured at their empty glasses. “Two more stouts?”

“Thank you,” Francis inclined his head and she took the empties away, followed by Eloise’s admiring stare.

“Are all your London friends that cool?” she hissed.

Francis pondered this for a moment, a rare note of surprise in his thoughtful gaze. “No,” he finally admitted. “My friendship with Mia is unique: I am happy if I have a place to drink in peace, and Mia is happy so long as I pay my tab promptly. In this we are honest with each other in a way that no one else in this city is.”

It was the first hint of the disappointment Eloise would come to feel about Francis’s new life. What had seemed a glamorous freedom began to take on the tarnish of loneliness. It was the one thing Eloise had hoped to banish on this visit, and to think that Francis was in any way unsatisfied with his life made her wonder again why he did not come home more often.

“_Nunc est bibendum_,” she murmured when Mia set another pint down in front of her.

Francis, unaware of the disappointment he had brought her, grinned and shook a pocketful of loose change. “_Nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus_. Care to pick some tracks for the jukebox?”

They filled a playlist and they drank Murphy’s. They argued about music and they talked with Mia about life in Detroit and the drag scene in New Orleans. They smoked and sang along to the sound from the jukebox and in the early evening, as the nine to five shift ended, Francis and Eloise leaned on the wall outside a takeaway and ate greasy chips while they continued to bicker about the sound of the ancient Greek aulos.

The drink grew harder; the night extended before them, and Francis took Eloise to the clubs that would not ask the age of _Lymond’s _younger sister. Through it all, whatever happened, wherever they went, Eloise remained locked inside his old denim jacket. No one noticed or commented; people wore what they wanted, how they wanted. In truth, not even Francis stopped to wonder about it until he brought her a morning mug of tea where she lay curled on his couch — still wearing the jacket.

“Do you want me to turn the heating up?”

Eloise sat up, tucked her hair behind her ears and accepted the tea with a grateful sigh. “Mm, what? No, I’m fine,” she smiled up at him. It was the same peaceful, trusting smile he remembered her turning on him since she could first walk, when she had followed him everywhere, transfixed by his matching blonde hair and blue eyes, eager to please and to learn all he could teach her.

He crouched down by the sofa and coffee table, wishing he did not feel so guilty about what he needed to say next. Wishing it could be different.

“Ellie, I have to go to the studio today. I need to sign some things before the American tour. It shouldn’t take long,” he put his hand on a copy of the _London A to Z_ that lay on the table.

“Can I come?” his sister asked breathlessly. “Oh, I’d love to see!”

“It...won’t be very interesting. I don’t think it would be a good idea,” he saw the excitement in her face crumple surprisingly quickly and was eager to offer reassurance. “Not today, anyway. Maybe we can go in later this week. There’s a demo I want to record before the tour, you would be the first to hear it in a studio.”

She brightened, even as he suppressed his own inclination to believe that the song was not really ready yet. It was a rare instance in which he was happy to quash his tyrannous perfectionism for another cause. “Here’s my _A to Z_. Here’s the bus timetable. Here’s my key. My address is bookmarked here, and I put in a bookmark for Mia’s bar too, if you get tired of exploring the big city. I should be free by two this afternoon, do you think you can make your way to the British Museum and meet me there?”

Eloise was already flipping through the map greedily. “Yes, Francis, I can work a map. I’ve done the tube now, haven’t I? No problem. British Museum at two. Then you’ll see I was right about the aulos.”

“You weren’t, and I’ll prove it,” he grinned, backing out of the room with a wave and slipping his sunglasses on. He jogged down the stairs, leaving a little of one kind of worry behind and submerging himself slowly into the other, familiar tension: anticipation, a sort of self-disgust, but coated nevertheless in hot, sickly need.

A dark car waited on the street, polished to perfection, with a suited driver at the wheel. Francis plunged into the back seat, feeling his heart rate increase as the door closed the outside world receded into a muffled, grey-tinged distance.

“Studio, is it, Willie?”

“No sir,” the driver glanced at him in the mirror. “She’s got the contracts at hers. Says it can all be arranged there.”

He nodded, his hands twisting in his lap, breathing heavy. “Good. Ok.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They're quoting Horace. As you'd expect.


	8. Chapter 8

Eloise was, naturally, the sort of person who was diverted by a good map. She flipped through the _A to Z_ as she drank her tea, mulling over the meaning of place names, imagining the planning behind street layouts and picking out familiar sites she had encountered in literature.

Next she took the opportunity to explore the flat in more sober detail that she had done the previous night (earlier that morning?). She padded barefoot around the kitchen with a piece of toast in hand, peering in drawers and cupboards. The same procedure followed in other rooms: she was surprised and saddened by how few books he had. All his favourites were still at home. The walls held only a smattering of instruments: guitars, mandolins, a violin. No sign of the sitar he had wanted, though. Next to the sofa a gold disc of Lymond’s first album leaned against the wall in its frame, never quite prized enough to be allotted the time for fixing a nail and hanging it up.

It wasn’t until she ventured into the bedroom that she saw something of the brother she recognised. The room was not tidy, exactly, but Eloise knew how the filing system worked. Scarves were draped on the curtain rail; she tutted when she saw one of hers that she’d long assumed had been lost. A speculative tug threatened to bring the whole lot down, so she left it for now and nudged a pile of blouses on the floor with her toe. Things she distinctly remembered buying were also among that heap of crushed velvet, patterned silk and gossamer lace. One wide-sleeved garment, something that Stevie Nicks would wear, caught her eye: the label proclaimed it to be a Westwood. Either Francis was making even more money than she’d realised, or his charity shop eye had improved.

Now that she had established his habit of borrowing from her, Eloise felt it was entirely appropriate for her to borrow back. The plastic bags at the back of the sock drawer — “unimaginative, brother,” she muttered to herself — contained a cocktail of uppers, downers and untold journeys. She helped herself to what she wanted, picked up her bag and the _A to Z_, and let herself out of the flat.

It was easy, on her own, to pretend she knew where to go and what to do. It took her no time to find her way to Trafalgar Square and its galleries, and from there to the British Museum in good time for two o’clock. She was early, and then Francis was late. She sat on the steps, scribbling determinedly in a soft-bound diary, and did not mind about the time until a shadow loomed over her.

Francis was in disguise again: sunglasses, cap and hood. His smile was a bit loose and he sniffed and wiped his nose when she looked up.

“What the hell are you drawing?”

Eloise, blissed out in her own way as Francis was evidently buzzing, turned the diary so he could see. “It’s you. As a Tudor. I dropped acid and went to the National Portrait Gallery. They have a lot of Tudors.”

In heavy, confident black lines, she had drawn his head and shoulders, his chin tilted to accommodate an enormous ruff collar and his eyes bugging from discomfort.

Francis turned his head from one side to another and let out one sharp note of laughter. He pointed to a doodle next to it, a sheep wearing a steel helmet: “I love it.”

They sauntered inside arm in arm, making the most of the weekday quiet in the galleries. They whispered their conversation in voices that were not low enough for the echoing surroundings, and their laughter reverberated off ancient stone sculpture and grand architecture. They forgot their argument over the aulos and instead capered around glass cases filled with Greek pottery, pointing out favourite myths and scenes to one another. When they came to rest it was on a bench in a room lined with the remaining treasures of the Parthenon.

Francis had let his hood fall, but kept the cap and sunglasses on. As she laughed at his recitation of lines from Aristophanes, Eloise noticed a dark, greasy streak on his neck, just behind the ear: not a bruise, not blood, but wine-dark lipstick. She smiled and resolved to solve this new mystery.

“Why don’t you visit home more, Francis? Is there someone keeping you here?”

His laughter faded abruptly and he sniffed and pinched his nose again. “What?”

“You know, someone whose company you enjoy more than ours?”

“I enjoy most people’s company more than that of Gavin,” he smiled at her and forced his shoulders to relax. “But no, I’ve just been busy. You know that. The album, the promotion, the tours...”

“No girl?” Eloise pushed. She was too fried to think how to be subtle. “No boy?”

He pulled a face and cast his head back to look at the stuccoed ceiling. “What? What gave you that idea?”

“Well, Richard said—”

“Oh, what’s he been telling you?” a weary groan bubbled from Francis’s chest, but he laughed ruefully as well.

“What about the French boy, from the battle of the bands?”

She saw his eyebrows lower behind the sunglasses as he puzzled for a moment, then they shot up, and a spot of pink appeared on ridge of his cheekbones. “_Jerott_? I, he’s, he’s not really French, he’s Pakistani. Scottish. Something. And he’s not — he wouldn’t —” Francis bit his lips and shook his head with another self-deprecating chuckle. “He had other priorities. I’ve no idea what he’s up to now. Happily married and on the way to acing his medical degree, I assume.”

Eloise, an elderly couple surveying the battle between the Centaurs and the Lapiths, and the gallery guard surveyed this outburst with calm. The silence following it rang around the empty space above them.

Francis sat on his hands to stop them twisting together, then changed his mind and released one with which to remove his sunglasses and look Eloise in the eye. “And it wasn’t like that. My god, Richard’s imagination. I wonder if he’s projecting.”

His pupils were huge, leaving barely a silver of blue at their edges, and he fidgeted as he tried to sit comfortably on his other hand. Still, Eloise believed him, and she supposed her own eyes probably revealed a similar state about herself.

“All right, fine then. Don’t you at least want some of your books sending?”

“No, little sister,” he sighed and replaced his shades, turning back to the frieze in front of them. “Thank you, but I fear I don’t have the time for keeping company with Joyce or Camus these days. Reading seems such an effort at present, I can’t imagine when I would be able to leave the world behind for an afternoon in another’s imagination.”

Even through the happy background haze of the drugs, after the giggling recitation of myths and legends they had both grown up loving, Eloise felt the joy drain from her at his words. She couldn’t understand how her bookish, soft-spoken brother had become someone who felt that reading was ‘an effort’ he no longer had time for. She tried to reassure herself that whatever he wasn’t mentioning was kept secret for his own protection: something, or someone, he could not yet share with her, thought he might want to. But her doubts must have been clear on the expression she wore.

“Come on, Ellie,” he said softly. “I think I did enough reading as a boy to keep me going for a few years,” he tried to make his smile reassuring; he really did try. “What do you say to…I don’t know, ice cream, and then we’ll swing by the pub and continue Mia’s musical education, and this evening, if you like, we can stay at the flat with the complete tapes of _I, Claudius_.”

It sounded pretty good; Eloise said so. But inside, she felt like a little more of her had been hollowed out, that a little more of the foundations on which she had built her image of her independent, brave big brother, had collapsed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me: *shoves unnecessary Francis/Jerott in BECAUSE I CAN*


	9. Chapter 9

What woke Francis Crawford, early one morning a couple of days later, was the sound of his own songs being played back to him on the mandolin. He and his sister had been making the most of London’s offerings and their youthful metabolisms, but the mornings had been sacred — until now. Eloise picked the strings with vigour, perched on the end of his bed, her hair flying as she nodded over the instrument.

Speechless, wordless, shirtless, Francis sat up and extended a hand to whack Eloise’s shoulder and arm. His hair was a tousled mess and his eyes were barely open, but the persistent patting on her denim armour eventually made Eloise stop. She looked at him with an impish grin.

“Is the new song ready? Can’t wait to learn it.”

Francis tried to rake his fingers through tangled curls and had to give up. He took the mandolin from Eloise by its neck and accepted the pick when she passed it to him. He lay back into his pillow and played the opening of the song he was to record later that morning, and his pliability was rewarded when Eloise brought him a mug of tea and some cold toast with butter unevenly mashed into its surface.

He still had misgivings about the song — it felt scrappy, unfinished to him — but Eloise was so desperate to see the studio and he wanted to give her the impression that he had a professional life, to prove that he was productive, and that if he was productive he had to be happy enough. Even so, he could not appreciate the extent to which she was anticipating the day. It was, at last, a chance to see the brother she had idolised do what he was best at, what had always been his truest passion. He was making money doing what he loved most, and to be a part of that, just for a moment, would be enough to revive anyone’s wavering hopes.

Her excitement seemed to have endless capacity that morning, from her chatter on the bus to the way she skipped ahead of him up the studio building’s stairs. A sense of growing misgivings made Francis’s limbs heavy as he followed her, but he tried to pass it off as weariness. “I’m nearly nineteen, remember Ellie? I’m practically decrepit.”

The studio, owned by Lennox Records, was unoccupied that morning. Francis passed the office secretary with a tip of his cap, and Ellie stamped on down the corridor, her boots leaving tread patterns in the plush blue carpet. She examined the discs lining the wall, muttering awed phrases until she came to a stop by one that had been hung very recently.

“_A Year in Montmartre_, Lymond,” she read out. “It’s gone platinum, Francis!”

“I know,” he smiled.

“But I only saw the gold one at the flat! When did you get this?”

“The same day I was given the gold one,” he walked past. One up, one down, was the display policy at Lennox. He only got to keep the gold one when it had been superseded; unless he chose to order a second frame himself.

At the end of the corridor they turned into the small studio set aside for demos and experimentation; or somewhere to send the drummer when he was getting on your tits. Francis removed his cap and hoodie and stretched out his arms to loosen the blousy sleeves that had been contained by the other top. He looked like a bird spreading its wings, the shirt a cascade of patterned frills above hip-hugging tight black jeans.

“So, you’re going to help record this,” he told her, and Eloise’s eyes widened. She leapt forward to stand by the bank of dials and sliders and listened to his instructions. She was dwarfed by the huge chair and the headphones — like a heavy crown, she thought — but quickly gathered the essentials. Francis picked fussily amongst the instruments strewn around the booth and the studio until he found a guitar that meant the right thing to him.

He tuned it and played some tracks to warm up, and he stood alone by the mic so casually that the segue into Rock’n’Roll Suicide took a few moments to catch up with Eloise. And then, brought about by the mixture of yearning and a cracked tension in the back of his throat, a sudden sheen of tears came to her eyes as he sang “oh no love, you’re not alone,” and the meaning of the song seemed stripped bare, a desperate plea without the enfolding support of the orchestra. He was just a boy with a guitar and a voice that knew about broken hearts, wishing the words were true.

She put her fingers in her mouth and bit down hard, willing the tears back inside with furious determination. By the time he had finished the song, though her nose was a little pink and her eyes glassy, she had managed to capture the fearful recognition of two people’s loneliness and bundle it up tight in her chest once more. She smiled and gave Francis a thumbs up, re-checking the settings on the console so as to avoid meeting his eyes.

After the previous performance, she could recognise what Francis already knew about the demo track: it just wasn’t quite there. It was good, of course, but he was holding something of himself back, and it left the song rather airy and forgettable. It was called The Sacred Grove, and seemed to be a fey troubadour-style story about a king sacrificed to bring his people good harvests. The words were chilling out of context, but his demeanour was steady and detached, omitting the emotion that Francis customarily only showed in playing.

Eloise nodded enthusiastically at him when he finished though, and only worried that her hesitation had showed when he directed a stony expression into the room behind her. Luckily she had remembered to switch off the recording before a hand dropped onto her shoulder, because the unexpected presence made her shriek and tear off the massive headphones.

A middle aged woman stood in the studio wearing a politely fixed smile. She was dressed immaculately in a steel grey fitted dress that announced to all onlookers how well preserved she was beneath it. Her hair was a cascade of warm browns and natural-looking blonde highlights, and her plum-coloured nails matched her lips. Dark, shrewd eyes pinned Eloise in her place, but the hand that had tapped her shoulder was now extended for her to shake.

“Hello. You must be Francis’s sister. ” Her voice was surprisingly deep and mellow, with the rounded vowels of those born to privilege.

She stammered her name and the woman’s perfectly shaped brows arched gently. “Eloise? How pretty. C’est français n’est pas ? Parles t’ il si bien que ton frère ?”

“Non. Mais je comprend assez bien,” Eloise said, a little prickly at this woman’s patronising tone of _tutoyage_.

“Margaret. What are you doing here?” Francis stood in the doorway to the soundproof booth, guitar in hand. He was pale and his jaw was visibly tight, and if she had been asked to describe it, Eloise would have said he looked afraid — though she could not recall having seen him afraid of anything before.

The woman addressed thus tossed her hair back and a wave of rose petal scent reached Eloise from the movement. “Hello Francis. You didn’t mention that your sister was visiting when you came by to sign the contracts. But I have my ways of finding out,” her smile was meant to be warm, but there may have been a warning in it. Eloise did not quite understand.

Margaret leaned against the console desk, stretching her legs out and placing her hands on the edge of the desk to either side of her hips so that the seams of her dress creaked a little where pressure was put on them; around all the correct curves, naturally. “Eloise. I’m Francis’s manager, the lucky woman who discovered Lymond. I also own Lennox Records. Have you had a tour?”

“No,” the girl managed, glancing between Francis’s stiff expression and Margaret’s display.

“Well you must, anyone with an interest in music — and I saw you watching him play there, you understand music very well, don’t you? — Anyone with an interest in music will love seeing the memorabilia we have around here.”

This offer did pique her curiosity, she couldn’t deny it, but Francis overrode her response. “She doesn’t need a tour, Margaret. We just came in to record the demo. We’re leaving now.”

Once more the black lines of her eyebrows rose, and Margaret looked at Eloise to see if she would express her own interest in the tour. After a pause, she tried another question. “Do you play an instrument, Eloise?”

Again, she was about to answer, and again Francis spoke for her: “She doesn’t play for an audience.”

“I do so, Francis!” Eloise stood up to see him better and folded her arms indignantly. She wasn’t sure what to make of Margaret, but she did know that she wouldn’t stand for her brother putting words in her mouth. “I play in my school band,” she told the record executive. “Guitar, violin and mandolin.”

“Well I would _love_ to hear you two play together,” Margaret said conspiratorially. “My gosh, you look so much like him!”

Eloise shrugged at Francis, seeing no harm in such a request. The idea of playing for the owner of Lennox Records excited her; a distant part of her brain was already experimenting with future narratives in which she followed her brother into music, upsetting Gavin so much that he publically disowned her and she was finally free of his tyrannical ideas of what was ‘proper’ for her.

But Francis’s eyes were cold and hard and he shook his head minutely at Eloise before answering. “No. We don’t have anything to play for you.”

Margaret turned to face him, and Eloise saw him wrestle with some feeling that made his lip twist. “I’m sure that’s not true. I’m free to come to the studio so rarely, Francis, it really would be a treat for me.”

“Eloise,” said Francis, his stare still fixed on his manager. “There’s a very out of tune ukulele in the booth. Why don’t you head in there and see if you can get any sense out of it?”

She frowned at him; she thought the uke was a dull, girlish instrument, and it wasn’t like tuning one was ever that much of a challenge. Still, she obeyed because he called her by her full name, and she stalked past Margaret, who was still smiling blithely at Francis.

It took her a few moments to find the ukulele among the jumble of instruments stacked around the edges of the booth, but finally, behind the drum kit, she discovered it: it was covered in dust and missing two strings.

“Francis!” she yelled, turning with an accusing glare and brandishing the broken uke.

The recording room door had closed behind her, and her voice did not carry; nor did the conversation on the other side of the soundproof glass pane. Francis was facing her, his arms folded and face grim and serious. Of Margaret, Eloise could see only her back, and that marvellous cascade of hair shimmering as she moved her head while speaking.

Margaret made some gesture she could not see, and a look of venom passed over Francis’s face before he took a step backwards, out of arm’s reach. Eloise tried to read what he was saying, but his thin lips and pinched expression made it hard. He glanced up and saw her watching, then clearly said something to Margaret involving the word ‘agreement’ and a question.

He did not like whatever her answer was, but he took the demo tape from the deck, snapped it in a case, and handed it to Margaret.

Eloise opened the recording room door carefully, as quietly as she could, but Francis and Margaret both watched her in silence as she emerged. Margaret put on a fresh smirk and stood, taking the tape from Francis.

“Francis tells me you’re far too busy today, and, truth be told, so am I. There’s a private party tomorrow night in Belgravia and Francis has agreed to do a solo show for the hosts, so perhaps we’ll get more of a chance to talk then,” Margaret shook Eloise’s hand again and breezed out of the room and away down the carpeted corridor.

Francis stood by the console and ground his teeth together, glaring as he idly moved faders up and down with his splayed fingers.

Eloise dumped the uke down on the edge of the console desk with a hollow clatter. “What was that about? Why couldn’t we just play a song together? We know loads we could play. Why did you lie about me playing for an audience?”

He mulled the questions over but did not look up for a few minutes. Just as she was about to ask again, he sighed and flicked the switches he had been playing with up to their maximum setting. “Margaret Douglas does not have your best interests at heart,” he told her, pacing to where he had left his hoodie and replacing the elements of his outdoor clothing.

Puzzled, and still piqued, she followed him across the small room, getting in his space so he couldn’t ignore her. “What do you mean? And what about _your_ best interests?”

“Ah,” was all he said as he shrugged his sleeves comfortable again and zipped himself closed. Then he settled his cap and looked at her fiercely.

“Eloise, let’s be frank. That was some second rate, second album, writer’s burn out bullshit. I am not ready to make another LP yet and I won’t be until I get some time off from touring. However, as I am contractually obliged to tour the United States in a few weeks’ time, that is unlikely to happen for some while. In light of this, I suggest we get absolutely fucking _fucked_ tonight and try to forget about such things.”

A little taken aback by the sudden strength of feeling, Eloise quailed. But she asked softly: “Forget about Margaret, you mean?”

His eyes widened, alarmingly blue, and a flush of — anger? — streaked his cheeks. “Above all, that. I don’t want to hear her name again until this fucking _soirée_ tomorrow,” he hissed.

For a boy she had seen so rarely angered, Francis took to it like a duck to water. They drank from midday, and from Francis’s occasional trips to the toilet, returning jittery and twitchy-nosed, Eloise gathered that he had other means of getting the party started. She stuck to her own hand-rolled cigarettes, trying to find calm in the face of the manic mood that had overtaken her brother.

Mia shook her head when she came by for handfuls of empties and Francis was away. “Some way to look after his little sister.”

“I’m fine,” Eloise shrugged, offering Mia her joint. “I think I’m looking after him today.”

The expression she received in return may have been pitying. “Uh huh. Some way to look after your big brother,” she handed the smoke back after taking a deep drag and stacked the last of the glasses.

Eloise had been sick at least once by the time they found themselves shouting at each other in the sticky, crowded club in a basement on Dean Street. They were surrounded by towering perms and mohawks, sticky synthetic cloth, and the corresponding stench of hairspray and sweat. Francis was recognised, his disguise shunned in the subterranean heat, but the crowd was too cool to acknowledge him with more than the occasional nod, or a pat on the shoulder and a “I love your song about Oscar!”

He and Eloise sat in a red-upholstered, crescent-shaped booth, smoking and arguing about petty things. Both were still feeling the effects of the studio visit — high emotions, resentment and frustration — and the sickly pallor of paranoia was beginning to taint their interactions.

“Maybe I should just join a fucking nunnery,” Eloise howled, throwing her head back against the red pleather.

Francis rubbed his face, laughing irrelevantly and shaking his head. “It’s only a few years, Ellie. He can’t really tell you what to do then. He wants you to think he can, but your life will be entirely your own.”

“No it won’t!” she insisted. “Life is never _entirely your own. _Don’t you ever worry about...about the weight of it? Heritage?”

He shook his head, and a shiver wriggled over his shoulders despite the heat. He was too wrecked to decipher the trepidation in her features, the way her hands clenched and unclenched in the denim of opposite sleeves. But the underlay of the coke made him alive to ominous portents.

He made himself look at her: a slightly softer, younger mirror, the now familiar pain associated with living etched around her eyes and grim mouth. Sweat at her temples, ash blonde tendrils of hair swept casually back, pupils nearly obscuring the grey blue of her eyes. They shared a kind of iconic look: a sense of agelessness and sadness born of knowing too much. Just a year ago this had made them seem little more than comically serious children, the kind told to lighten up at family gatherings — _get your nose out of that book and go and play! Sitting in here all alone, don’t you want to see uncle this and aunty that?_ In only a few months they had independently passed over to a wan disaffection, an unassailable, observer’s place in a world full of terrifying certainty.

“Heritage?” Francis echoed.

Eloise made an equivocal face and looked down at her fingers folding and twisting the edge of her jacket. “Yeah. Don’t you read your reviews?”

“I don’t.”

“Well they all, to a fault, compare you with granddad.”

“I know. It’s why I don’t read them.”

She nodded. For a moment, it looked like she might say something more, but no words came out. Another glass of cheap malt blend later, and the melancholy seemed to have subsided: she tugged on Francis’s arm and begged him to dance. The live re-release of Good Golly Miss Molly was playing, and Eloise shimmied into the crowds, arms fluttering up, body twisting. Francis allowed himself to stand at the edge of the room, swaying vaguely, nodding to the music.

She put her all into the moves, trying to lose herself in the sound reverberating around the cavernous ceiling. Her eyes closed, she looked like an evangelist swept up by the preacher’s voice, sweat shining on her face and neck in intermittent flashes of coloured light.

One moment she was there, her features lit up in purple, then in the next burst of light she was not. Shock jolted through the haze of substances Francis had consumed and he sprang forwards even as the crowd parted, dancers coming to a standstill, peering down into the gloom of the floor.

Eloise was conscious, crumpled on her back, a dreamy smile on her lips that soon shattered into laughter. Her skin was flushed and her hair was now soaked with sweat; Francis could feel the heat radiate from her as he helped get her on her feet. A woman with blue hair and dramatic make-up handed him a glass of water as he conveyed Eloise towards the stairs, searching for fresh air. He sat her on the staircase, hesitant to venture into the street where photographers might be waiting for news stories. Muttering curses, he handed her the water, then took it off her to tug at the thick jacket, trying to peel it from her shoulders. Too drunk and woozy with the heat to object, Eloise still did not exactly help him; it took a few tries to pull it free, and as he did she moaned a complaint.

“Oww,” she chuckled throatily as it dragged roughly down her arms. She reached for the water and raised it to her lips with both hands, but Francis sat back heavily on the step, the jacket gripped in his white knuckles, his mouth open in horror.

From her wrists to her shoulders, both arms were covered in wounds. Old and new, some scarred, others barely scabbed over, one or two bleeding where the friction of the jacket had reopened them, but all formed of cruel little lines: gaping mouths of skin that had been opened up by a blade wielded by one body against itself.

“Jesus,” Francis breathed, touching his fingertips to his sister’s bare shoulder.

Eloise finished gulping what she wanted of the water and then poured the last of it over her head. She blew a puff of liquid off her lower lip and turned to Francis, still not quite caught up with the situation. “What?”

“Ellie,” he breathed, his eyes roving frantically up and down her right arm. Acting on a sudden fear, he grabbed her wrist and turned it, only barely registering his own relief when he saw the veins there intact, the wounds on her inner arm stopping a respectful distance away. “Ellie, what have you done?”

Understanding fought its way onto her features, and she wrapped her arms around herself protectively, huddling small on the stair. “Give me my jacket back.”

“No, you’re far too overheated,” Francis folded it and kept it wrapped in his own tensely crossed arms.

“I want a cigarette,” she glared at him.

Placing the jacket on the opposite side of his body to her, Francis reached into his own pocket and rolled two papers with tobacco. “Have one of mine,” he passed her one, and then, after a moment’s hesitation, relinquished the lighter too.

Eloise dragged on the fag sullenly, but would say nothing to his grimly pleading look.

“Do I need to take you to A and E?”

“No.”

“Will you tell me why you did it?”

“No.”

“How long you’ve been doing it?”

“No.”

“Will you promise not to do it again?”

“No.”

“Then let’s go back to the flat. There’s a late night corner shop at the bus station, I’ll get some antiseptic and plasters.”

She ground her teeth, staring at the peeling paint on the stairwell wall, her eyes welled up with unshed tears. Breathing through her nose, she finally brought her emotions under control and took another draw of tobacco. When she nodded acceptance, Francis felt relief in every muscle of his body. He stood and waited for her to join him, then, after a swift sally back into the club to retrieve her bag and his hoodie, he led her away through streets intermittently peaceful and raucous.


	10. Chapter 10

They had an uncharacteristically subdued morning afterwards: the living room in Francis’s flat filled with used mugs and plates of nibbled on beans on toast. _I, Claudius_ played on, episode after episode, and neither sibling mentioned the previous day’s discoveries. Both approached the evening with a sense of reluctance; a building unease, near dread, at the idea of leaving the sacred, easy silence between them in exchange for a gathering of entitled strangers.

It was meant to be Eloise’s last night in London, and it was not how she had wanted to spend it. She had hoped, secretly, not to have to make it her last night at all.

The sky had been dark for a few hours before Francis finally dragged himself into the shower and selected a conservative outfit from the piles of clothes in his room: straight-legged dark trousers matched with a long-hemmed jacket, the only concession to his usual flair coming in the form of a faded Ziggy Stardust t-shirt.

Eloise scrunched her nose at the effect. “Should I be dressing up, too?”

She picked up the Westwood top she had noticed the other day and shook it out. Francis stepped over a mound of shoes to snatch it off her and hurl it back to the ground. As it fell, the fabric let off a distinctive whiff of rose petal perfume.

“No. Don’t give them the idea that you want to be one of them.”

Awed into silence, Eloise sat in the back of the car that had been sent, staring at the orange-lit streets slipping past. The journey was longer than she expected, stretched out through nervous anticipation, punctuated only occasionally by the driver’s attempts at conversation.

The building they stopped outside had a towering Georgian face. Pillars at the rows of porticos looked like prison bars until Eloise looked up and saw the actual iron railings covering the lower halves of the tall windows. She shuddered at the effect and stuck close by Francis’s side as they went in. Images from a half-familiar world glided by: intriguing prints and paintings lined the walls, staff in white tie opened doors or bustled past. Eloise nearly expected Gavin himself to come barrelling around a corner with his rounded, rugby-player’s shoulders and scowl.

The rooms they were shown to were crowded with clusters of people holding tall glasses of sparkling wine. The high ceilings gave the noise space to swell above them, afloat on the gentle hint of piano music in the background. The people were a mixture of nondescript, be-suited professionals (young politicians, speculating on the youth vote by cultivating friends in trendy places) and pops of colour: artists brought in to show off their scene, to represent a culture or a movement, or just riding off a series of shock headlines in the tabloids.

Their arrival was not announced — not publicly —but Margaret Douglas materialised from the crowds almost as soon as they stepped into the room. Eloise stood nervously at Francis’s elbow, holding a glass of champagne and wondering if, by accepting it, she had made an unspoken pact with this other world: she had partaken of the fairy food, and summoned Margaret to negotiate the handover of her soul.

The older woman merely smiled at her, extending both hands to clasp Eloise’s free fingers, her touch shockingly warm. She wore a similar dress to the one she had worn to the studio, but this was a matte, funereal black, set off by a collar of classic pearls and matching earrings. “So glad to see you again. May I borrow your brother?”

It wasn’t really a question. She placed a hand on Francis’s shoulder to steer him away, and Francis, jaw clenched, did not manage to look back as he was swept into the room. Eloise was left adrift, her feet mired in the thick carpet, holding a drink she did not like, and knowing that if she lit up here the smell of her cigarettes would cut unforgivingly tough the tobacco smoke already gathering in the room. “Fuck,” she moaned to herself, catching the scent of rose petals through the smoke. _Francis, what are you doing?_

She slumped miserably against the edge of one of the big sash windows, grimacing as she sipped at the champagne and glaring daggers at all the sycophants and cut-throats in the room.

“Welcome to the wall of ‘why the fuck am I here,’” a rough London accent said from the opposite edge of the window.

Eloise glanced sharply at the man leaning against the heavy turquoise drape of the curtain. He was skinny and looked grizzled, clad in a scuffed and patched old leather waistcoat: a lone survivor of punk’s implosion, his plumage a thin mohawk and a collar with sagging inch-long spikes.

Her lip curled at this relic and she tried to make it clear that she wasn’t interested in conversation. He didn’t care about the cues at all though, and ignored her crossed arms, the shoulder turned to him, her stony-faced silence. He talked almost as though to himself: “Here we all are, bought and paid for, waiting for an arm to take us out to centre stage when we’re needed. Nothing without the structures holding us up, and we’ve got to keep building, higher and higher, give them something to step on as they go, taking raw culture and saying they invented taste.”

Eloise’s eyes widened in exasperation as she replaced her empty glass on a passing waiter’s tray and snatched a fresh drink.

“Hang on, you’re another one, aren’t you?” Now he was scrutinising her denim jacket and Docs, looking her up and down in an analytical way.

“Yes, I’m really one of them,” she snapped, thinking of the dinner parties her mother hosted and the events their family was given free tickets to because of who they were. Her discomfort at this gathering came in a large part because she knew its beats so well. It was the life she had been born to, like it or not.

“No, you’re a Crawford. You look just like him.” The old punk hunched forwards a little, but remained glued to the curtain on his side of the window. “The young fella, _Lymond_ doesn’t he call himself? And the old rocker, the other Francis,” he chuckled a dry rattle of laughter. “Not that conceited, hypocritical Tory bastard.”

At this, Eloise couldn’t stop her lip from pulling up in wry amusement. The man acknowledged this with another laugh as he lit up his cigarette and offered her a smoke, too. She accepted, and she also accepted a little square of the coloured blotting paper he drew from an inside pocket: “This should take the edge off it.”

Eloise burned through the fag quickly, eager to feel the acid melt against her tongue. For a few blissful moments, even her companion in disillusionment had nothing to say as they stood framing the window, lost in a sweep of nicotine and anticipation. The peace couldn’t last though: he liked the sound of his own voice too much for that.

“Here, she’s not got you signed as well, has she?” he jabbed a pair of fingers across the room at Margaret Douglas, her smile wide, her elbow tight around Francis’s arm as she shared pleasantries with a group of dark suited men. Francis’s face was a pale beacon in the low-lit surroundings, his expression carefully neutral: a blank canvas onto which his audience could project whatever they wished.

Eloise shook her head against the weight of the curtain. “Me? No,” she let out a mirthless cough of laughter. “Think she might have liked to.”

“Then take my advice,” he turned his intense stare on her, his hands up like a lure to catch her attention. “Run. A fucking. Mile. Get out of here. Don’t let her get you, too.”

The acid was starting to make his edges fuzzy already; the colours in the room shifted restlessly. Eloise scorned his seriousness with a scrunch of her nose. “Maybe I was already running, trying to get here.”

“Bad idea,” he shook his head. “She’s a spider, this whole scene is a web. You think I want to be here? You don’t want to be here, fella over there doesn’t want to be here. But here we all are, because _she_ wills it.”

Eloise eyed her brother uneasily. The friendly haze of the drugs was already mutating, retracting, leaving the edges of her vision dark.

“He’s not her performing monkey. He’s playing tonight as a favour,” Eloise said hollowly, thinking of Francis’s fury after the encounter at the studio, the streak of lipstick on his neck after going to sign contracts the other morning. Margaret was old enough to be his mother, she couldn’t really be... Eloise swallowed, her mouth dry from the blotting paper, the cigarettes and the wine.

“Think again, little sister,” the punk sighed, lighting another cigarette.

Sometimes you simply meet the right people at the right time; sometimes it’s the wrong people, saying the wrong things, their life experience stacked up just so as to refute all the hopes you had lined up for yourself. There was no malice or personal attack in the punk’s words, but his jaded resignation fed Eloise’s grim mood. Pointlessness lay ahead, whatever direction she faced, a life beholden to the callous arrogance of an older generation that thought she necessarily owed them something.

She knew that she could not rebuild her relationship with Gavin: things had been said, truths she had suspected, confirmed by his own defensive fury. Sibylla tried to remain neutral, above their rows, but she had icily refused to acknowledge that recent altercation. Eloise had thought that, maybe, her independent big brother, living his dreams in the city, would be able to take her under his wing, at least until she had figured out what to do next. Fat chance of that: he seemed to have been made into the exotic pet of this smug middle-aged executive, his life was almost less his now than it had been when he lived with Gavin. At least, as Sibylla’s darling, he had been allowed to study in Paris — a temporary freedom. Eloise had never been given that option.

She drank the champagne she was offered, swilling bubbles around her teeth as she waited for Francis to sit down in front of the piano: to take his turn amongst the creatures on display. The effects of the acid enveloped her gradually, like light fading on a dimmer switch, the second-thoughts and worries at the back of her mind growing louder, fuelled by fears of going back home, her fears for what would happen to Francis, left on his own in this jungle of predators and reptiles. The closer she looked, the more she could see their scaly skin and sharpened incisors.

When he finally sat down at the bench, she shivered despite the heat radiating from her body. The punk who had been talking to her, railing against politicians of all stripes, was now still, his eyes closed as he leaned against the curtain, absorbed by his own trip.

She longed for Francis to look up, just once, and to give her a subversive smile. To let her know that it was all right really, he had a plan, and he knew all this was ridiculous but he was just playing along for now. Instead, he breathed in as he positioned his hands, paused for a moment, and then launched into a cover of one of their grandfather’s ballads.

“No, no, no,” Eloise whined. He hadn’t listened to Francis Crawford senior’s records since he could control the hi-fi. He hadn’t wanted to be influenced any further by that sound, those expectations. But here he was, playing those songs for a politely indifferent audience of the privileged and the powerful. It made Eloise weep with frustration.

She shook her head and made for the door as quickly as she could without careening into the groups of people scattered about the place. One or two glanced at her, but she was of no consequence to them, and she only felt obliged to mutter to the staff standing by the entrance “I just need some air” as she hurried past.

Down the soft tread of the stairs, past the portraits of grey-haired men and those in towering wigs, Eloise rushed gasping into the night. She needed to be alone for a minute. She needed to think things through. The darkness seemed full of grasping hands and the blood rushed in her ears, so she put her hands on her knees and bent forward, trying to calm her breathing.

She needed to take a little walk and clear her head. Then she’d know what to do next.


	11. Chapter 11

The note had come in amongst condolence cards from people whose names he barely recognised. He’d opened it and puzzled over the scrap of paper torn from a school exercise book, but it had seemed better than a card from a stranger at the time. However, as weeks went by and he found himself mired in questions of inheritance, accounts, taxes, emigration, he soon forgot about it. He had almost thrown it out in the work of clearing the flat, but the handwriting had stopped him.

Not only had his father failed to see his wedding day, but Alisha’s family had called the whole thing off after one cancellation too many. Jerott hadn’t had the stomach to tell his father, so until his death, Jawad still believed his son had a path to marriage and community held open for him. After that final, abrupt phone conversation with Alisha’s father, Jerott’s final letter to her had been returned unopened, and he had swept up thoughts of that future along with evidence of his father’s life, boxing it all up, preparing to move on.

Then he had rediscovered the tiny, recycled envelope with its London postmark and hastily scrawled message: _Meet me at the Kelvingrove at 1pm on the 28th February (school trip!!!). Please please don’t reply to this, just be there. Alisha x p.s. Sorry to hear about your dad. I hope you’re doing ok._

Jerott sat on a bench outside the gallery under suitably heavy winter cloud. He smoked to keep warm and killed time by rereading the message, wondering why she’d sent it and why he had come as asked. The gallery was busy, there were buses in the car parks and tour groups coming and going. He watched the people passing with impatience, wondering why she would send a message a month in advance and then not show up. Was it some idea of a joke?

But he didn’t have anywhere else to be, did he? Jerott lit up another smoke and sighed, mulling over the sky and wondering how long he would be able to make himself stay there if it started to snow.

“Are you J... Jerry Blyth?”

It was nearly two when he turned to see a black girl wearing a dubious expression, her fists knotted at her sides, a rucksack fastened tight on her back. She had all the air of a schoolkid out of uniform, and a Londoner’s distrust of new places and people.

“Jerott,” he corrected her, flicking his fringe back and leaning his elbows on his knees with a matching air of indifference.

“Whatever. My friend’s waiting for you. She’s in the bit with the knights,” the girl gestured stiffly at the gallery.

Jerott finished the cigarette, stood at his own pace and stubbed out his fag with a toe.

“You just gonna leave that there?” Alisha’s friend curled her lip and pointed at the butt.

Jerott shrugged and sauntered away towards the gallery, hands deep in the pockets of his leather jacket. He had no more an idea of where ‘the bit with the knights’ was than he had of anything else in the place. He followed a floor plan upstairs towards the armoury and peered around the forest of polished plate and deadly weapons, looking for the girl whose picture he still kept in his wallet.

Instead of a bright sari and shawl, carefully arranged smile, neat hair and glittering jewellery, he saw a girl in a denim jacket with a choppy fringe across her forehead and black hair in a ponytail. She didn’t wear much make-up and her only jewellery consisted of the simple studs in her ears and nose — and a Specials badge on her collar. She was looking up at a suit of armour thoughtfully, but the hands holding her sketchpad and pencil were still.

“...Alisha?” hands still in his pockets, Jerott bowed awkwardly to catch her eye and get a closer look at her face from the side.

She blinked and grinned, turning suddenly and taking a step back. This was nothing like the quiet, still image of girl given by the letters: her green eyes sparkled with mischief and her smile could only be described as rogueish. “Hi! Jerott!” she clutched her sketchbook to her protectively.

“Thanks for coming,” she freed a hand and tucked a strand of hair unnecessarily behind her ear.

His shoulders raised a little and he looked at the floor. “Sorry I’m late. I was waiting at the front.”

“Oh, shoot, didn’t I say the armoury in the note?” she had put her book in her bag and now stood with her hands behind her back, looking like she wanted to lean nonchalantly against the glass of the display case, but hesitating because she worried it might be alarmed. “Sorry, I did write it a while ago.”

“It’s ok,” he said, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say in the face of such vivacious, restless charm.

Alisha pressed her lips together in a conciliatory smile. “Look, you probably think this is really weird. I just...I felt really bad about how Mum and Dad treated you. It was, well, my big sister got engaged suddenly, and then that took the pressure off me. They never really liked the idea you might drag me off to Glasgow or something anyway,” she rolled her eyes laughingly.

Jerott laughed back and ran a hand through his hair. “Honestly, I think my Dad hoped you’d be sweeping me off to London.”

“Um, so, sorry your last letter didn’t get an answer. Dad screened everything you sent...”

His eyebrows shot up and he tried to remember what the hell he’d written. Maybe the circumstances were just an excuse, and he’d unknowingly said something awful, something that had ruled him out as husband material and that had been that.

“It was all fine,” Alisha raised her hands and finally leaned back against the — not alarmed — display case. “I mean, I liked reading them, but I’m sure they were about as accurate as mine were. Great start for a marriage, huh?”

They both reddened and tried to shrug it off with more nervous laughter. Jerott’s mind tumbled in confusion: why had she come here, just to tell him that she wasn’t really the person her letters had made her out to be?

“But are you ok? Do you have family here now?” Alisha might have just asked because she felt obliged to, but it felt unimaginably good to be asked.

“No, my Mum lives in Paris. I’m moving back to hers next month.”

She nodded her head, wondering what else she was supposed to say to someone whose father had died, but her silence didn’t perturb him, because by now Jerott’s curiosity had now gotten the better of him.

“Are you in Glasgow long?” he asked leadingly.

Alisha glanced over his shoulder and he turned to see her friend gesturing frantically in the doorway. “Yeah, yeah! Five minutes!” Alisha hissed across the gallery.

“Sorry,” she turned to him. There was no sentimentality in her eyes, but Jerott saw an entirely new person who he suddenly, desperately, wished he could know. “We’re only here tonight. School camping trip! D of E gold, baby,” she grinned. “Wait, do you do that in Scotland?”

“Yes.” Her smile was infectious. “Do you...have time for a drink?”

She looked surprised for a moment, but happily so. “Oh man, I wish. I’m already gonna be in trouble for staying late after lunch. Jess is holding the bus for me — I hope!”

He was bad at hiding his feelings, and he knew his disappointment showed, but he tried to turn his frustration into a smile. “Ok. Well, thanks for getting in touch. It’s good to know it’s nothing I said, anyway.”

Alisha hefted her bag and looked at him for a long moment. Then — “fuck it” she muttered — she took a step forward, put a hand up to his cheek and planted a warm, lingering kiss on his lips.

She was gone before he could catch her and persuade her to stay. Already halfway across the gallery she waved as she went: “glad I got to meet you in the end! Hope you have a good life!”

He stood where she had left him, something newly empty about his chest. Eventually he made his way to a seat in the middle of the gallery and stared at the displays, thinking of all he had got wrong about her from her letters, and wondering what life would be like now if they had both just been a bit more honest and a bit less like who they were expected to be. It was an imagined world in which somehow his dad was alive and he had won the battle of the bands jointly with Francis Crawford. He imagined Alisha and Jawad cheering them on stage as the two boys played; he imagined the wedding that he had never let himself truly imagine before; and he saw how happy he might have been if life had not played such dirty tricks on him.

“Sir, the gallery is closing now.”

Jerott looked up at the elderly attendant and left the gallery behind for the indigo blue evening. It was bitingly cold, still threatening snow, but Jerott felt hot all over. His hands shook as he lit his cigarette in the empty car park and the sound of his own breath made him want to swear or scream. Anger, like he had never felt, seemed baked into his bones.

Others could sense it on him, too. It was a long walk, but he didn’t want to be on brightly lit buses or have to make small talk in a taxi. He deliberately chose a path back to the hollowed out flat that took him through poorly lit residential streets, and the few people he met chose to cross to the other pavement or walk in the gutter rather than get in his way.

Under the misleading warmth of a peachy street lamp he encountered a gang of shaven-headed boys gathered like city pigeons. _Out for a bit of Paki-bashing, lads? _Jerott thought. _Good. Bring it on_. He clenched fists deep in the pockets of his leather jacket and hunched his shoulders, eyeing the group as he approached, deliberately forging a path down the centre of the pavement. They glowered; one spat into the drain. Jerott’s heart raced in anticipation of pain, a sensation that might puncture the fury that had buried him alive.

But they sized up his expression, his determined step through the middle of their group. They hesitated, shuffled restlessly around him as he passed through, muttered a few filthy words, but did not throw down their cigarettes or launch any punches. The armour of his anger was palpable even to them, and they had no interest in helping him break free of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> D of E gold = Duke of Edinburgh gold award. A thing you do at school, from bronze to gold, that involves volunteering in the community, sports, and a camping excursion, which Alisha is on her way to.  
Also, Scottish kids often finish school at 17, while in England and Wales your A-levels don't finish until you're 18.  
-  
I wanted to not have to kill Elizabeth (Alisha) off in this story and I was looking for ways of having an 'intelligent, talented and spectacularly wild young man' end up thinking he was going to get married as a teenager in 1979, but also feel betrayed at life and furious about everything when things don't work out how he expected. So here we are.


	12. Chapter 12

**Troubled genius? “It doesn’t matter who likes my music” our reporter gets an exclusive meeting with Scottish sensation Lymond — and finds him impossible to interview**

Cover story by ----------.

I’ve got to admit it: I was pretty thrilled when _Stone_ asked me to interview Brit rock darling, Francis Crawford. There’s just one problem, I thought: he’s been dead for fifteen years, hasn’t he? No, no, says my Ed, not that one: his grandson, Lymond, a teenaged troubadour whose debut album, _A Year in Montmartre_, went platinum in the UK four months after its release. Lymond is Stateside to promote the album over here, and for starters he’s got an epic seventy date tour lined up.

Marrying the glamour and imagination of the New Romantics with the incisive, angry politics of the London post-punk scene, he’s an obvious inheritor of both punk and glam traditions. The album hooked me from first listen. It draws on Lymond’s experience of life in Paris, where he attended boarding school, and ranges across topics as diverse as the disgraced author Oscar Wilde, the end of colonial rule in the Maghreb and the history of the guillotine. He even includes one song in Breton about the controversial independence movement in the north-western region of France.

If that all sounds a bit insufferably undergraduate to you then don’t sweat it: Lymond knows how to keep you hooked with a tune. His guitar-playing is exquisite, and he’ll easily rival his grandfather’s skill if he keeps up the work: he finger-picks his way through strains reminiscent of McCartney and Young and more esoteric styles learned from jazz folkies like Django Reinhardt and Davey Graham. But there’s no sixties mustiness to it, or seventies nostalgia: it’s underwritten by a confident rhythm section and hints of bravura in the keyboard-heavy tracks like ‘Graveyard View’. It might be a bit too much of a grab-bag of styles for some, but it’s one hell of an assured entrance onto the scene.

So, newly excited now I had found out a bit about the actual guy I was interviewing, I headed to the bar on the outskirts of Hell’s Kitchen where we’d agreed to meet. I’d been warned ahead that there had been a measure of family drama in his life recently. His younger sister Eloise Crawford (sixteen) was officially declared missing just before he left the UK — she was last seen in London on a night out with Lymond, who has been openly blamed for her disappearance by family members, including his father, the MP Gavin Crawford. We like our heroes best when shrouded in mystery, even more when tragedy is involved — I was curious to see how these events were affecting him.

When I arrived, he was already in the bar, wearing dark clothes in a dark booth, sunglasses on and those long, musician’s hands wrapped around a Scotch and a cigarette. He looked the part alright, almost in mourning color but for the green and blue silk scarf draped around his shoulders. I sat down with my own drink and tested the waters, asking if he was going to keep his sunglasses on for the interview.

The response was not promising: he took a drag on his cigarette and shrugged. So far, meeting my expectations of the reticent Brit abroad. Maybe it was just that dead-pan sense of humor. Maybe it was the pain of loss and guilt weighing on his shoulders.

RS: Congratulations on going platinum with your first album. It’s quite ambitious subject matter to bring to the masses. How do you think American audiences will react to it?

L: I suppose the same way any audience does.

RS: What does that mean?

L: (sighs) Some will like it and some won’t. It doesn’t really matter to me.

RS: You don’t care if anyone listens to your music?

L: Not remotely what I said. It doesn’t matter who likes it. It’s out there, it is what I made it to be, and some people will understand it — some will think they do, some will want to understand it, and others simply won’t and won’t want to.

RS: So it’s about integrity? You’re not interested in making popular things for the sake of it, your own musical interests come first.

L: (laughs) no. But it’s a nice idea.

RS: Okay, let’s talk about the tour. You’ve been playing live dates pretty much non-stop since you signed with Lennox Records last December, and these seventy dates will take you through to the end of a crazy busy year. Have you got enough left in the tank to take America by storm?

L: I’m sure I’ll find a way to manage.

RS: Well, you do have youth on your side… Speaking of, you won your record deal at a local battle of the bands, right? Any advice for young musicians out there hoping to make it in the same way?

L: Take a lawyer.

RS: To the battle of the bands?

L: Wherever you play.

RS: (laughs) Right then… What about writing? You range over so many topics, but your lyrics always seem so rooted in place and time. How do you keep the focus of each song so narrow, while keeping the album itself coherent?

L: I read. The sound is just something that comes together in the studio.

RS: That simple?

L: (shrugs) Yes.

RS: (losing patience) But it’s good to get away from London for a bit, right? I understand you’re not very popular with your family right now.

L: (finishes his drink and orders another with a gesture to the waiter) Oh?

RS: Is it true you took your sixteen-year-old sister on a drugs and drink binge in London’s wildest nightspots?

At this point I see no response except a loss of color in his cheeks. I wonder if he’s going to break a glass, or slam his fist on the table, or just get up and leave, but he just has another sip of his drink and lights up a cigarette. I ask him about it again, and he stares off to the side of the bar, shades still on, acting like I’m not there until I have to change topic.

RS: So, is there any part of the USA you’re really looking forward to seeing?

L: I’ve heard the Grand Canyon is really something. And I’d quite like to see a giant redwood up close.

RS: Not CBGB or the Mudd Club? Maybe find some inspiration for your second album?

L: I understand that is what’s expected of me, yes.

RS: Will we hear any new tracks on the tour, or will you just be playing material from the album?

L: No. I don’t know, actually. I haven’t decided.

RS: Could you talk a little about the experiences that influenced your first album, and your songwriting process more generally?

L: (smiles) I’m sure I could.

At this point, I think he took pity on my floundering, and decided to be more talkative, so by the time I got back from the bar he was ready to list all the names you’d expect: Bowie, Cohen, The Who. He namechecked the locals, too: Talking Heads, Dylan and Paul Simon (though swiftly followed them with a mention of obscure British folk singer Martin Carthy, who it’s been suggested wrote the arrangements used by Dylan and Simon on two of their biggest hits). The most contemporary reference was to Kate Bush, another teenager who shot to stardom. He wouldn’t be led on those similarities.

All too soon, our time was up, and I had barely scratched the surface of Francis Crawford Junior. I shook his hand and told him what I’ll tell you now: the album is great, the talent is there. America is ready to fall in love with Lymond, it just needs him to offer it a little something of himself first. Making an interviewer feel awkward is one thing; making a crowd feel awkward is a whole other kind of unforgiveable.

Of course, when I switched the tape recorder off and put away my notes, his smile relaxed and he even removed his shades to thank me. I believed him when he told me he appreciated my words on the album, but he looks tired, old for nineteen. It’s not since I interviewed a young Nico that I’ve wanted quite so much to both shake someone by the shoulders and take them home for a hot meal and a bit of care. Let’s hope Lymond finds a more stable path than she did.

_Photographs by TJ for Rolling Stone. TJ says: I met Lymond at his hotel before the interview but couldn’t get much out of him. He was pale and serious and completely uninterested in posing for me. Finally I hit on the idea of taking him to a music shop nearby and it was really fascinating to watch. Almost despite himself he opened up, walking round and picking up god knows how many kinds of instruments, strumming them, caressing them, humming songs to himself. I was lucky enough to catch his expression in one or two shots, which you see in this piece and on the cover. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's no meaning to the interviewer's lack of name, I'm just leaving it blank in case a suitable Easter egg occurs to me down the line...


	13. Chapter 13

He’d seen the tabloids. The copy of the _Evening Standard_ he had bought to skim in the taxi was still going over the story in its gossip pages.

_Rail, rail against the dying of the light: Lymond’s anguish caught on camera the night his sister vanishes. A reader who had been drinking in The Hole in the Wall on the platform of Sloane Square station sent us this snap of his girlfriend in the pub, and isn’t she lovely? But take a closer look. It was only when the pics were developed that Jim Stewart noticed the familiar blonde mop in the background: the musician Lymond (grandson of the beloved Francis Crawford) screaming at the empty track, only just realising he’s lost his little sister._

Richard folded the paper and put it in a pocket of his sheepskin coat. He pulled the collar up as he stepped out onto the street, cursing the chill of the city in winter. It seemed a grim neighbourhood to him, peeling and fraying and cheaply tacked up. But the building he approached was constructed of a solid enough Georgian brick, standing up to the air of neglect with a stoic face. Richard checked his address book and grimaced, but didn’t hesitate before pressing the relevant bell.

After a moment the deceptively heavy door opened inwards, Francis standing almost entirely behind it, and Richard had to step into the gloomy shared porch before his brother would reveal himself as the door closed.

“Well, fuck,” Francis said, and turned to walk up the stairs.

Richard followed, breathing shallowly in the musty air. If anything, it grew darker as they travelled upwards. Francis moved silently in bare, grubby feet, his old dressing gown billowing as he went. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days and his chin and cheeks were patchy with untested, teenage beard.

The curtains were drawn in the apartment even though it was early afternoon. Clothes, crockery and instruments littered the surfaces; Richard tried not to look closer even as he discerned empty plastic baggies, scatterings of white powder, and, amongst the compost of Francis’s clothing, various items belonging to a woman. It was his turn to swear.

“Open the curtains, Francis.”

He didn’t argue, though the light revealed the dark circles under his eyes, the red around his nose and mouth, and, to Richard’s utter disbelief, his wide-blown pupils.

“What happened? What happened to her?” his voice cracked on the second word. Richard had thought he’d experienced all the anger he could muster already, but he felt nausea scoop his chest out again; horror dredged up from somewhere deep; and the only person he could blame was standing there in his underwear and the dressing gown he’d got for his fifteenth birthday, trying not to let on that he was high as a goddamned kite.

Francis spread his palms, his mouth downturned with misery. “She’s gone. I don’t know. She’s gone.”

“But _why_?” the armchair between them, and the surrounding obstacle course, prevented Richard from getting close enough to wrap his itching hands around Francis’s scrawny neck.

“She left. I didn’t see.”

“The police are saying they’re not treating it as suspicious. They told Mum that Eloise had a history of,” Richard choked on his sister’s name and the thing he had to say. “Of self-harm and drug use.”

His eyes filled with tears, and he was glad he couldn’t see Francis’s lack of response more clearly. “Can you imagine what that’s done to her?”

“Oh, come off it Richard. Where do you think she found the weed? Mum’s had her supply in her jewellery chest as long as I can remember.”

It was impractical, but Richard still tried to move around the chair, taking two swift, long strides, his fists displayed with intent. Francis edged away to the other end of the couch just as quickly. Richard didn’t want to hear any of this. His life had been perfectly blissful until his younger siblings had started tearing down his idols: one argument, revelation, or newly granted permission at a time.

“But it wasn’t cannabis she had that night, was it? It was one of your London friends who gave her the acid. Can you imagine, Francis? On her own, having, having god knows what sorts of, of ... visions.” Richard’s own imagination failed at the thought. “Why didn’t you take better care of her?”

“What can I say to that?”

Richard bunched his hands in the cushion at the back of the armchair. He thought he had gone there wanting Francis to deny his role and explain with good reason what had happened — how he had tried to stop it. But now he realised that an admission of his brother’s part in this was all that would come close to satisfying the unwieldy rage he felt. He picked up a mug balanced on the chair arm and hurled it at the bare wood floor. The violence of the sound helped a little, too, as Richard fought to calm his heavy breathing.

He glared up at Francis, who stood very still. “You let this happen. You could have helped her, but you were too absorbed in your fucking rock star lifestyle. I’ve seen the papers: you were high that night. You’re high now, for fuck’s sake. So keep running, Francis. The guilt will catch up with you eventually.”

“What, convicted without a jury?” his brother said mockingly. “You want to believe it Richard, so why should I bother denying it.”

He waited, eyes narrowed, trying to figure out what sort of plot this was. But Francis just stood there, tired and deflated, a shrug poised on his skinny shoulders. Richard nodded: it was as good as he was going to get.

“I don’t want to see you again outside the gutter press,” he stood up straight and moved towards the door. “And don’t let Dad catch you at home, he’ll call the police and tell them you’re a trespasser and a thief.”

Francis’s mouth moved, his lips pressed together as though he was trying to stop the word coming out. But “Sibylla?” he asked, the barest hint of emotion vibrating in his voice.

“Don’t do that to her. She’s distraught. You’ll only make it worse.”

Richard paused on the threshold. He wasn’t in the habit of challenging his long term view of things, and could not really immerse himself in the idea that this was the last time he would have any sibling at all. But something of the moment did make him uneasy, and he looked searchingly at Francis once more, perhaps hoping this last glance would confirm his brother as fallen angel or demon outright.

No such luck. Francis just looked like a scruffy nineteen-year-old: he bit his lip and his face was pale and still as marble, but his eyes shone a bit too brightly. “Goodbye, Francis,” Richard sighed, and let himself out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> End of Part I.  
-  
Part II is about the same length, and has been written, but I'm being a fussy editor. I'll try and post it soon.


	14. Chapter 14

Live review: Lymond at The Bottom Line

For those of you who follow things across the pond, you’ll have heard rumours of a new Bowie carried on the ocean breeze. Androgynous and fiercely talented, Lymond has been causing quite a stir with his debut album, _A Year in Montmartre_, not least because of the inventive flair of his live shows. Alternating between poetry and song, weaving together the works of the Romantics with his own compositions, he is known for the lush imagery of his lyrics — and the pantie-dropping swoon of his voice and versatile playing style.

It’s a pity then, that he seems to have checked most of these things at customs. At the beginning of what is meant to be an epic, all-conquering US tour (yeah, another one…), he looked bored and sounded catatonic. No poetry, no flair, just dead-eyed, perfunctory rock music. I mean, sure, it was played crisply, and he didn’t hit a single bum note in the set, but he may as well have just left a boombox on stage and asked the sound tech to turn the album halfway through.

Lymond played a set that was basically just the album tracklist, in order, with no new material or any of his sly, subversive covers — his Rip Her to Shreds is said to have caused the evacuation of one venue in Nottingham after a stage invasion, and there’s a live recording of him singing a track called Wow by the young Brit singer Kate Bush that is the wildest thing I’ve heard call itself rock since _Sgt Pepper _redefined the album. It’s a great pity Lymond didn’t show this inventive, playful side in Manhattan, because while the album is a solid and moderately exciting debut, it’s the work of a young man still growing into his potential. Lymond looked like he had so much more to give; I hope he’s not going to fizzle out after one shot like so many others.

★★☆☆☆  
**The rest of the tour dates are in the live listings; it’s probably worth going just in case he gets his mojo back, but don’t hold your breath for anything world-changing.**


	15. Chapter 15

He shrugged his guitar off and picked up the magazine with one hand and a beer with the other. The former was open on his interview, and the page was covered with Margaret’s neat cursive hand. _Good title_, he read. _Train this: mention the local clubs. What the fuck?? NO. Good start: what about Beatles + Stones? _Francis let out a pained sigh and tipped his head back to swallow the best part of half the beer.

“What the fuck?”

“Oh, it’s herself. I thought you had managed to get your notes to nag me out loud.” Francis dropped the magazine.

“We’ll get to that,” she replied with an ominous look at its pages as she sidled in around chairs, wielding her appointment book and drink.

Francis did not sit when she did, despite her expectant look. She sighed and rolled her eyes, lighting a cigarette and rubbing her temple as though tormented by the weight of the world.

“Well? What was that?”

He shrugged.

“Oh, _don’t_, Francis. You might be able to unsettle some old hippie interviewer with the silent treatment, but I know your bullshit. No patter? You didn’t even introduce or acknowledge the band? No thank you to those people who put up with whatever that was, for a full hour, with no encore?”

“I fulfilled my contractual obligations.” He finished the beer and opened another.

Margaret’s ox-blood lips twisted wryly. “And where did the boy learn that language?” She blew smoke up towards the yellowing backstage ceiling, watching him closely. “No more of...this.” She waved a hand over the magazine and flicked her fingers, open-palmed at him. “You can take America. You can do what so many have failed to do. But you have. _Got_. To. Play.”

He considered her for a moment, his lids lowered and a dangerous spark in his eyes. “I haven’t really been in the mood lately, to be honest.”

She raised her brows, genuinely mystified. “Oh? _Oh_. I’d heard you were close. Were the rumours true?”

Margaret watched his knuckles whiten on the neck of his beer bottle, saw it shake minutely in his grip. He raised it to his mouth and drank quickly, messily. The sight of the lager trickling over the edge of his lip still made her light up, possessiveness and fire in her belly.

“Well, wouldn’t a true artist use it for inspiration? You have to let yourself feel it, Francis, put that into your music.”

That made colour come into his cheeks, all right. Margaret smoothed her skirt and sipped from her glass, satisfied with the results of her efforts. She would get a good night’s entertainment if she could keep him wild like this.

“No,” he said, and she shook her head and smiled.

“No?”

“I won’t do it anymore. I don’t care about _taking America_. I don’t want to play a seventy-date tour. I won’t sell my, my emotion, whatever, myself, for _this_.” He spoke quietly, still standing across the table from her.

Margaret studied him, trying to work out how drunk he was, how much of a spur of the moment response this was. “But my dear, as you said, you are contractually obliged,” she reminded him warningly. She knew how to handle him when he was angry: he found the emotion itself embarrassing, a failure of his self-control. All she needed to do was tease out that awkwardness, that sense that he was letting himself down.

But Francis shrugged. There was a different look in his eyes, one more hopeless, more pained than furious. “You can’t stop me from walking out.”

All her heat turned to ice when she realised, belatedly, that this was serious. Margaret leaned forwards and stood. “Think about this. Where will you go? Do you know that your travel expenses are your own, and you’re only here because I paid out of my own pocket for your flight? Do you know that I have paid for all that you have taken in the past year, and that it remains mine, whatever you do?”

“Then keep it,” he said with venom.

“You’re behaving like a child.”

“I was a child!” He still kept some curious measure of restraint on himself, but he held his neck stiff and tense as he stepped away from the table; away from her. “A year ago, at Solway. I was a child, and you didn’t care.”

Her lip curled. “Nor did you, from what I recall.”

He shook his head. His voice went flat. “Keep the lot. I’ll make my own way.”

“What are you doing?”

“I bought this guitar in Edinburgh three years ago. It’s mine. But I got new strings before the tour. They’re yours.”

She had to step back as he deliberately loosed the strings with as much tension as possible still in them. One by one he unscrewed the fittings and pulled them out, flinging them in bounding coils at her feet.

“And the top, I believe.” He pulled the dark material up over his head and threw it at her.

Despite herself, Margaret caught it and stared at that pale, taut skin, the fine golden hairs at his navel, small pink nipples hardened with anticipation different from that in his eyes. Something of his intention dawned on her.

“Francis. It’s November. You can’t—”

Off came his belt, out flew the contents of his pockets. He ripped the strap from his guitar and grabbed it by its bare neck. No self-conscious fury remained, just the defensive pain of a cornered animal.

“Goodbye Margaret. Thanks for the record deal,” he snarled.

She had nothing more to say as he walked from the green room. With every step, she believed more fervently that he would stop and turn around, give her a crooked smile and return. This was madness. Seventy dates! She would have to cancel the best part of seventy dates!

When she heard the back-door squeak on its hinges and felt a gust of snowy air, her head rang with one thought only: _how the fuck do I get my money back if he kills himself in a New York winter?_


	16. Chapter 16

Apparently the year was a nostalgic one. It glanced back wistfully at the memories of punk and glam, and wished they had not died so young. It pulled out old favourites and dusted them off for the charts; it took solace in things that had been successful before (number 1 in May, first released a decade earlier: Suicide is Painless, the theme from M*A*S*H).

Moving on would be difficult: how could it be done without attracting words like derivative, lazy, unoriginal? Much safer to remember the genius that had already been, rest assured that at least we would always have that. There was more happening, of course, newness in every record store and club, but it was a bubbling, nebulous, contradictory mess of scenes, because the past is easy but the present confounds.

We like to tell ourselves that origin stories are special. Legends are forged through hardship, and heroes can only rise to their true potential once they have passed through suffering. Look at that guy in his thin coat on the cover of _The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan_; think of desperate people at cross-roads, think of life-changing choices. Live for the music or you may as well not be alive. You can’t be a troubadour if you don’t wander and you can’t be a bluesman if you don’t get your heart broken. Youth is impatient, and it will demand these experiences from life: now, because I must earn the future. Because this is the only way.

But origin stories are tidied up in the retelling. They are life as a series of montages, taking only the significant hardships and leaving out the daily trivialities: the blisters on those wandering feet and the weakness in the legs of a hungry man. You can’t give away too much when you tidy it up for public consumption, because if, in the retelling, you stop to remember the details you might ask yourself: was doing it this way really worth it?

Then again, at the time there did not seem to be another way. The sound of a back-door slamming shut is an irrevocable thing: metallic and large, big enough that for a second it dwarfs the whole city. It can be a portal from one life into another — but probably only in the retelling. At the time it’s just a noise loud enough to make your teeth rattle, its vibrations enough to shake a dusting of snow off the gutters above.

Really, it was a year in flux, like every year is when you live it — but people get introspective around zeros. They want to know what it’s all for, just in case this is the last one. And you can’t know until later, in the telling.

Francis Crawford did not leave the venue in search of answers: he had been telling himself it was all for the music for so long that he didn’t know what that meant any more. Wasn’t music just another thing that Margaret Douglas owned? He left to get away from answers. To find other questions to ask. To take himself out of himself, peel away the skin and see what emerged.

In the case of Lymond’s missing year, the details would — for the most part — remain as tantalisingly opaque as he chose to keep them. Who could say how he was able to disappear from the public eye overnight, vanishing into the frozen air? Only one other person, and he had his own reasons for remaining quiet. Unchallenged, Francis slipped into the city shadows, dropping into lives deemed unlawful, unsavoury, unimportant. He was an immigrant amongst immigrants, haunting scenes of furious creativity where the crumbling past began to give way to a cynical new future.

There was no one to convey news of him to his family, and his passport remained in a locked drawer in Margaret Douglas’ hotel room. Sibylla had to read of the disappearance of another child in the Sunday paper, her hand rattling the butter knife on her plate as she set thoughts of breakfast aside. She took her reading glasses off and cleaned them, breathing quickly. She replaced them and read the piece again, and massaged her chest with a shaking hand. Gavin looked at her over the top of his broadsheet. “You saw?”

She nodded, but knew there was nothing she could say to him. At least he had enough feeling for her still that he did not gloat or observe that all had ended as he would have predicted. He poured her another cup of sluggish, rich Turkish coffee and promised to leave the crosswords for her.

Sibylla waited until she could see Richard, tear-glossy eyes meeting over gin and tonic in the Balmoral. He had never learned to hold to his grudges, and now, with his last infuriating meeting with his brother so far behind him, Richard had only love and worry for the boy he ought to have protected. They hugged and tried not to talk about Francis as though he were dead; they tried not to talk of Eloise in those terms either. Richard vowed to get in touch with ‘that awful woman at the record company’ and put some money out as a reward for information. They reassured each other that Francis was clever and stronger than he looked, that he had ambitions and was resourceful. They imagined the stories they might hear from him when he resurfaced. When he came home.

Francis Crawford would certainly never speak to anyone of the way his first year of professional musicianship culminated in a thick fever and a bone-aching cough, soothed and nursed by one who only returned at unsociable hours between precarious jobs. How he lay weakened on a narrow mattress, shivering in layers of someone else’s coats and jumpers, watching powdery snow try to reach the streets and fail — swirling in gusts around the twelfth story window instead.

As he answered for his hard living and avoided thinking of what had been lost, the outside world woke up to an intriguing new mystery. How was it that Lymond, last seen bumming cigarettes off fans and signing their cassettes in the cold outside the venue, could have simply disappeared? He was not a household name in America, but surely even in Downtown Manhattan people would notice a topless man with a bright blue guitar wandering the streets?

Then again, it is relatively easy to go missing in New York, and the city is a maze that traps and ensnares the unwary. The worst had to be assumed as apologies were made and bookings cancelled. It was the north-east. It was winter. Temperatures were unforgiving, the streets were a desperate tangle of struggling lives, and bodies were often never found. When a man with nothing but the jeans on his body and a useless instrument goes missing on a November night, and the weeks pass, and the silence stretches, what more can be said?

Margaret Douglas had tried to downplay the worry, the tragedy, to soothe the people who thirsted for a story. She claimed a half truth: he had taken a break for the sake of his health. She omitted the effect of lessons she had taught him, like how to preserve consciousness in a state of exhaustion with the right cocktail of drugs, and how to prioritise the pleasure of the body over long overdue rest. She omitted the details of his contract, and the argument and the blame that had been cast. She did not mention the unfamiliar, personal sting that his absence brought her.

However, the world was accustomed to Margaret Douglas giving firm answers when she had them, and it was rapidly clear that this was not a situation she had any control over. Lymond’s life was no longer one she could mediate, and the hysteria of the rumour mill swelled. Weeks passed, and public certainty eclipsed her hedging statements. Records flew off shelves: Lymond now had a cult following of professional mourners and misery vampires. Lennox Records profited.

His new fans looked back on his album and they saw his pain: the song about the graveyard, the yearning, the references to people passed and places lost. The public rewrote the terms of his life, lined up his disappearance next to his sister’s and nodded sagely with understanding. Too wise for this world. Too much feeling. Too fragile and brittle to make a stand in the face of all that pain.

In a London record store, on an afternoon free of lectures, Jerott Blyth stared uncomprehendingly at the pages of a colourful music magazine and tried to work out how this tragic icon related to the inventive, playful boy he had been friends with for a thrilling month in 1979. Francis’ voice drifted down the corridors of student halls and his guitar-playing soundtracked shops catering to the counter-culture. Jerott stopped listening to the charts and buying new releases: confronted with a cult that worshipped a loss that hurt him in a way he could not explain, he retreated to his room to revise and to make his own music.

Publicly, Francis Crawford’s family said nothing: one statement requesting that their privacy be respected, reiterating Gavin’s feelings towards his son following the loss of Eloise. Sibylla was not heard from, never seen without the large, square sunglasses that covered half her face. Richard would be swept aside by one of his father’s aides if he looked as though he might say something ill-advised. The Crawfords closed ranks, keeping the memory of Eloise protected within, and leaving the memory of Francis out, open to the public for reinterpretation.

Privately, Margaret Douglas fought hard to maintain the habit of a lifetime: she would not second guess her decisions now. Not ever. But she had thought him a clever one; the disappearance shocked her. A sliver of electric heat struck her chest when she thought of him, and she wondered at the suddenness of the loss. He had not seemed the type for self-destruction — but then again, all that coiled energy had to be released somehow. Through some emotional outlet he had kept from her, perhaps. Who knew what had gone on behind those thirsty blue eyes, after all?

She stayed awake late, standing at her hotel window, smoking into her own reflection, contemplating the cold river and thinking of the fragile body of a boy. She did not open the window to sample the wind’s bite: she was no romantic, and could imagine suffering quite well enough without needing to share in it. She listened to his record again and felt the burden of wasted potential settle on her like a heavy cloak. But she had a responsibility: his legacy. She would scrape together what demos she could. Find some live recordings. A second album could be made, even without the artist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all who have read, commented, kudosed, or lurked.
> 
> Since the last update there has been a lot of dissatisfied re-writing, but I think it will be better for it - and I have two lovely betas now! If you like the AU and are curious/impatient to see how things pan out and fit together then check out my [Whumptober fics](https://notasapleasure.tumblr.com/tagged/whumptober2019) set in thus universe. Big plot spoilers for TRC/CM are tagged 'lymond spoilers'.

**Author's Note:**

> Huge thanks to [Erinaceina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Erinaceina/pseuds/Erinaceina) and [stripedroseandsketchpads](https://stripedroseandsketchpads.tumblr.com/) for beta-reading, cheerleading and general support and awesomeness. You two absolutely rock.  
-  
Please feel free to talk to me about things, here or at tumblr (notasapleasure). I have many ambitious ideas and only a certain amount of time to write them down at the moment.


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